Someplace to Be Flying (31 page)

The vandals had obviously struck only hours after she’d left for the airport, so this mess had been stewing for days. The smell was enough to make her sick all over again.

“What could they possibly think I have?” Lily asked.

Hank had found her garbage bags and was beginning to fill one with the spoiled food.

“If we knew that,” he said, “we’d probably be a long way toward figuring out just what the hell this is all about.”

Cody was still lying low so it took Ray awhile to track him down once he’d parted company with Jack in Lower Crowsea earlier that day.

It was almost noon before he finally spied the long white Lincoln Continental parked out front of Cecil’s All-Nite on Williamson north of the Tombs, a twenty-four-hour diner that used to be on the highway before the strip malls caught up with it and made it part of the city. He pulled his rented Ford Escort in beside Cody’s long white and killed the engine. From where he sat, he could see Cody sitting in a booth with his back to the door, his bristly hair pulled back into a dark gray braid, skin so dark it looked like he spent his days sleeping in the hot summer sun.

If it hadn’t taken Ray so long to find Cody, things might have worked out differently. Maybe they could have talked things out. Maybe Ray would just have yelled at him. But by now he’d had too much time to brood and the immediacy of his anger had banked into hot coals sitting deep in his chest. The heat wouldn’t let him think straight. Jack had been wrong. Even hearing the whole story, he only had one message for Cody.

He slid his lanky frame out of the car and walked into the diner. The woman at the cash register looked up as he came in and started to speak. Her voice died in her throat at the look in his dark eyes. He moved down the aisle between the booths and tables, not trying to hide his approach, but already in hunter’s mode, leather boots not even raising a whisper from the linoleum underfoot.

When he reached Cody’s table, he grabbed Cody’s hair and slammed his face down onto the table. A half cup of coffee and the remains of Cody’s late breakfast when skidding across the table, some of it falling on the floor, some on the opposite seat. The customers at the nearest table scrambled away. Ray jerked Cody’s head back, fist cocked, but then he froze. The long barrel of a Pearl-handled .45 was pointing at his stomach.

Ray released his grip on Cody’s hair and stepped back.

Cody’s nose was broken, blood running in small rivulets from his nostrils, down his chin, dropping onto the tabletop, his lap, the front of his white shirt. There was no expression in his eyes, but he was smiling. The .45 never wavered as his free hand found a napkin and wiped the blood from his face.

“Thing is, Ray, I like you,” he said. His voice was muffled, like he had a bad cold, but his tone of voice was as though they were having a normal conversation, as though his nose wasn’t pushed to one side and spewing blood. “Which is why you’re not dead. Yet.” He grabbed hold of his nose and forced it back into shape, giving no indication of how much just touching it must have hurt. “You want to tell me what this is all about?”

Ray hesitated.

“I’m not asking,” Cody told him.

He motioned Ray into the opposite seat with the barrel of the .45. When Ray had brushed off the vinyl and sat down, the gun disappeared back into its shoulder holster. Cody looked around the restaurant.

“Show’s over, folks,” he said.

Nervously, the two men who’d been sitting at the table nearby returned to their seats. At the counter and other tables, the customers turned away. The woman at the register had a phone in her hand. When Cody’s gaze lit on her, she slowly cradled the receiver and stepped away to fuss with a coffeepot. A murmur of conversation arose once more, but
everyone
was studiously ignoring them.

“I’m waiting,” Cody said, turning back to Ray.

“You didn’t tell me she’s my granddaughter.”

“You didn’t ask.“Ray gripped the edges of the table, knuckles going white.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Cody told him.

“Why’d you involve her in this?”

“Because she’s perfect. You know how rare a canid-corbæ breed is?”

Ray had to take a steadying breath. “We’re talking about my family.”

“Oh, like you’ve ever paid any attention to her before this morning.”

“I didn’t know she even existed before this morning.”

Cody wiped the last drip of blood from under his nose. Wadding up the bloodied napkin, he tossed it onto the table and settled back in his seat. Ray waited—there was nothing else he could do—as Cody pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shook one free, lit up.

“Who told you about this anyway?” Cody asked.

“Jack.”

Cody laughed. “That old fart tell you anything else interesting?”

“That you’ve called the cuckoos in on this.”

“And that’s a problem? We’ve got no beef with them. Only the
corbæ
need to worn? about them and I don’t see you sprouting black feathers all of a sudden.”

Ray could only shake his head. Bringing in cuckoos was like asking a school of piranha to help you find a ring you dropped in the river while you and your friends were still standing around in the water, looking for it yourself.

“She’s got corbæ blood,” he said.

Cody took a long drag and blew a stream of smoke up to the ceiling. He was oblivious to the surreptitious glances they were still getting from the dliner’s other customers.

“You have to learn to relax,” he said. “Relax and trust me. Your little girl’s not in any danger.”

All Ray could do was shake his head. “Do you have any idea what could happen to all of us if they get hold of Raven’s pot?”

“It’s not going to happen.”

“How you figure that?”

Cody flicked his cigarette toward the ashtray. Most of the ash went on the tabletop.

“Because I’ve got everything under control,” he said.

“Like you have even? other time? Or is this going to be the exception?”

Cody shook his head, put on a sad look. “This isn’t like you, Ray. Since when did you get so negative?”

Ray stood up.

“I don’t remember saying we were finished with our conversation,” Cody told him.

“So shoot me.”

“Did you ever think that maybe I was trying to help her?” Cody said as Ray started to walk away.

Ray paused and looked around, but Cody was still facing the other side of the booth, cigarette smoke trailing up along his cheek. Ray moved back until he was standing beside the table.

“Help her how?” he asked.

Cody turned to look at him. “The Morgans never liked her people.”

So Jack was right about that, too, Ray thought. Cody had brought in more than one family of cuckoos. The Couteaus were bad enough, but the Morgans had a longtime grudge against the corbæ:, Jack in particular, which made it even more dangerous for his granddaughter, seeing how she was also Jack’s daughter.

“We’re
her people,” he said. “She’s almost full-blooded.”

“I mean her human people.”

“What’s that got to do with—”

Cody cut him off. “Plus she’s got more corbæ than canid in her. Lot of strikes against her—do you see where I’m going with this?”

Ray shook his head.

“Pay attention, Ray. Now I don’t know why Chloë‘s brought your little girl into the middle of all this, but the only way to keep her safe is to let the Morgans know she’s on our side. That she’s working for us.”

Ray sighed. Cody was the master of justification and like any explanation he ever made, this had a certain ring of truth about it. The problem was, he wasn’t Prepared to believe Cody anymore.

“Tell them she’s out of this,” he said.

Cody made a helpless gesture with his hands. “You know I can’t do that.

When it comes to them, you’re cither on their side or you’re expendable. And considering the serious strikes your girl’s got going against her—I’m talking about how they see things, now—she doesn’t even have to get in the way They’ll do her for the fun of it.”

“Then you better figure out a way to convince them otherwise,” Ray told him.

“I thought we were friends.”

“You don’t have any friends,” Ray said. “Only people you use. Funny. It took a corbæ to help me figure that out.”

He walked away from the table again, half-expecting a bullet in the back but Cody let him go. Ray didn’t know whether to feel relieved or not. He was still alive, but maybe the only reason he was still alive was that Cody couldn’t be bothered to kill him. In the grand scheme of how Cody looked at the world maybe Ray wasn’t enough of a threat.

Or maybe he was going to let his new allies do the job for him.

Ray didn’t plan to stick around and find out. Soon as he got on the road, he was going to pick up his granddaughter and get them both as far away from this place as he could, as fast as he could. Considering the large population of corbæ: living here, and with at least two families of cuckoos now on its streets, the city was about to turn into a war zone.

“Did you know you talk in your sleep?”

Kerry woke bleary-eyed to find one of the crow girls sitting cross-legged on the floor by the head of her futon, the girl’s dark birdlike eyes peering down at her with great interest. Maida or Zia? Kerry still couldn’t tell them apart and being woken from such a deep sleep didn’t help. Her head was frill of a fog that was only slowly clearing.

“Which one are you?” she asked.

“Maida, silly. Your friend—remember?”

The crow girl’s good humor brimmed over with such infectiousness that Kerry automatically found herself grinning back at her.

“Does that mean Zia’s not my friend?” she joked.

Maida shrugged. “I don’t know. I just saw you first, that’s all.”

Kerry sat up to put her head level with her uninvited guest’s, feeling more awake now. She liked these girls, though that didn’t mean she wanted them to have free run of her apartment. Only how did you explain the idea of privacy to someone who had no concept of it?

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Waiting for you to wake up. You are such a sleepyhead. It’s almost ten. Everybody else has been up for hours and they’re all busybusybusy.”

“I guess I needed to sleep in.”

Maida immediately looked unhappy. “Did I wake you? I didn’t mean to wake you. I was just sitting here being ever so quiet.”

“You didn’t wake me,” Kerry assured her.

“Rory says we’re not supposed to wake people unless it’s an emergency, like if we really need some jelly beans and he’s gone and hidden them and we can’t find them no matter how hard we look.”

“That’s what Rory calls an emergency?”

“No. But we do.”

Kerry had to laugh.

“I need some tea,” she said and pushed aside the comforter so that she could get up. “How about you?”

“Will it be sweet?”

“As sweet as you like it.”

“I like it very sweet,” Maida said, trailing after her into the kitchen. “I like it more sugar than tea.”

“Have a sweet tooth, do you? Maybe I should just give you a cup of sugar and not bother with the tea.”

Maida got up on one of the kitchen chairs and perched there like a bird, sitting on her heels.

“That would be good,” she said.

Kerry filled her saucepan and put it on the stove. From a cupboard above the sink she brought down two tins and two mugs. She took a tea bag out of one tin and placed it in her own cup. Glancing at Maida, who was watching her with an expectant expression, she filled the other mug from the sugar tin and brought it over to the table. Maida lifted it to her mouth and licked some of the sugar out.

“Mmm,” she said. “Just the way I like it. Not too hot and not too cold.”

“Are you hungry?” Kerry asked, going back to the cupboard to get some bread.

“No.”

“Well, I’m having toast.”

“I’ll just watch and have my very delicious tea,” Maida told her.

Kerry turned from the counter to find the crow girl regarding her guilelessly, as though there wasn’t anything in the least odd about licking sugar from a mug and calling it tea. Kerry could only shake her head.

“I feel like Alice after she fell down the rabbit hole,” she said.

“Who’s Alice?” Maida wanted to know. “She must have been very small. To fall down a rabbit hole, I mean.”

“It didn’t happen for real. It’s just a story from a book.”

“But still … she’d have to have been small.”

“Sometimes she was small,” Kerry told her, “and sometimes she was big. As big as a house. She had all sorts of adventures—playing croquet with a pack of cards, meeting a talking tortoise.” She had to stop and think about that for a moment. “Or was that in the other book?”

“I know some tortoise people,” Maida said. “I could introduce you to Sleepy Joe—he lives right here in town. One time Zia got into a face-pulling contest with a tortoise boy that went on for days and days and days.”

Kerry’s water was boiling. She took it from the stove, turned off the burner and poured the hot water over her tea bag.

“What do you mean by tortoise people?” she asked as she returned the saucepan to the top of the stove. When Maida didn’t answer, she looked around to find the crow girl regarding her with confusion.

“That’s just what he is,” Maida said. “You know, the way Zia and I are crows.”

“Oh, I get it.”

They had a friend who pretended to be a tortoise. For a moment there, Kerry had thought she was being serious. Turning back to the counter, she took out a couple of slices of bread and put them in the toaster.

“You sure you don’t want some toast to go with your … um, tea?” she asked.

“I’m sure. This is very filling.”

Kerry didn’t doubt that a whole cup of sugar would be very filling.

“So what was I saying in my sleep?” she asked as she joined Maida at the table.

Maida shrugged. “Nothing much. I thought you were telling me not to give you some sort of a pill and I told you I didn’t have any to give, but then I figured out you were talking to someone in your dreams.”

A dream from her old world. She was having them almost even? night. She’d probably always have them.