Someplace to Be Flying (66 page)

“And having you and Annie helped a lot,” she added. “I would’ve been lost without you guys.”

She regretted bringing Annie up as soon as the name came out of her mouth. But Rory seemed to be dealing better with it these days. He only got a wistful look. Maybe there was hope for them yet, she thought. But she wouldn’t push it.

“The house sure is quiet this last little while, isn’t it?” was all he said.

Kerry nodded. Annie was away on tour. Chloë and Lucius had gone to Europe for an indefinite period of time. The only people in the house proper were Rory and herself. And of course the crow girls, who still came and went pretty much as they pleased, though Kerry had been waging a mostly unsuccessful campaign to have them respect her privacy and at least knock instead of wandering into her apartment whenever the fancy took them.

As though thinking of the pair had been a summons, there was a knock on the door and the crow girls were there, standing in the hallway, grinning, little cloth sacks held up in front of them.

“Trick or treat!” they cried.

Kerry smiled. “You’re a bit early, aren’t you? Halloween’s not until next week.”

“We’re practicing,” Zia told her.

“I see. And where are your costumes?”

Maida laughed. “We’re wearing them, silly. We’re pretending to be crow girls.”

“But you are crow girls.”

Zia gave Maida a poke with her elbow. “See? I told you we should have better costumes.”

Maida ignored the poke. “What are you going as?” she asked Kerry.

“I’m a little old to go trick-or-treating.”

Zia shook her head, very emphatically. “Oh, no. We asked Margaret and she told us that no one asks your age when you come to their door.”

“I just can’t believe we never knew about this before,” Maida said. “Who’d have thought that you can go around all dressed up and people will just give you sweets when you knock on their door?”

“But only on the one night,” Kerry told her. “Which isn’t until Thursday.”

“So we can’t practice?” Zia wanted to know.

“Well, you could practice the dressing up part.”

They both looked a little glum.

“Does this mean we’re not getting a treat?” Maida asked finally.

Kerry laughed. “Of course not. Come on in and we’ll see what we can find.”

“Ah, the sisters incorrigible,” Rory said when the crow girls trooped into the kitchen ahead of Kerry.

“We’re not sisters,” Maida said.

Zia nodded. “Kerry and Katy are sisters. We’re just friends.”

“Of course,” Rory said, giving Kerry a wink.

Kerry could only wonder what it would take to make him wake up and really see the world as it was, instead of how he supposed it should be.

The only thing she had to give the girls was a hazelnut chocolate bar that was in her fridge. She broke it in two and handed the halves to them, but they both immediately raised their bags instead of taking them from her hand. Smiling, she dropped the chocolate into the bags.

“Can we see the tattoo again?” Zia asked.

Maida nodded. “Oh, yes, please.” She grinned. “Do you see how veryvery polite we are getting to be?”

“I’m very impressed,” Kerry told her.

“What tattoo?” Rory asked.

The tattoo had been Katy’s idea. Kerry had been a reluctant participant in the scheme until they got to the tattoo parlor and Hank’s friend Paris had shown her the design she’d drawn up from Katy’s instructions: a fox’s head with a black feather behind it. Kerry had immediately fallen in love with it and had it done that afternoon.

The crow girls crowded close as Kerry lifted up the sleeve of her T-shirt to let them see the tattoo on her shoulder. For some reason they never got tired of looking at it.

“I’m getting a thousand of those,” Zia announced. “All different.”

“I’m getting two thousand,” Maida said.

Zia shook her head. “You don’t have room for that many.”

“Yes, I do. They’ll be veryvery tiny. So tiny you’ll need a telescope to see them properly.”

“You mean a periscope.”

Rory wasn’t listening to the girls chatter. He had an odd look on his face as he looked at the tattoo himself.

“What’s it mean?” he asked.

“It sort of symbolizes my parents.”

His gaze lifted to her face. “What, like a fox and crow were their totems or something?”

“Jackdaw,” Kerry said.

“What?”

“It’s a jackdaw feather, not a crow’s.”

“I’m getting crow feathers,” Zia said. “Hundreds of them. I’ll have them tattooed all over my back.”

“I’m getting mine tattooed on my bum,” Maida said.

They both giggled, but their conversation continued to fall on deaf ears.

“It’s funny,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m remembering this, but I had a dream about you one night-not long after you first moved in. You were sleeping in the back of this abandoned car and there was a blackbird and a fox watching over you, like they were protecting you or something.” His gaze returned to the tattoo. “When I woke I started sketching some designs, mixing the fox and bird images up. … I wonder what I did with them.”

“I’d like to see them.”

Rory nodded, still bemused. “I remember telling Chloë about that dream, which is weird since Chloë and I never talked about anything that didn’t have to do with the house. She was looking for this tin that had gotten accidentally thrown out. There were these weird black stones in it.” He looked up at her. “I should show them to you… .”

His voice trailed off.

“Do you … remember anything else?” Kerry asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, strange things. About crows and ravens and jays… .”

For a moment she saw something stir in his eyes. A memory. An image, perhaps. Then he blinked and smiled.

“What would I remember about them?” he asked.

Kerry let her sleeve fall back down, covering the tattoo. “Nothing,” she said with a shrug.

That night Katy came by to find her sitting in her window seat, looking out at the dark leafless shape of the crow girls’ elm. Kerry lifted a lazy hand as her sister crossed the room and came to sit at the other end of the window seat. They pulled their feet up and put them in each other’s lap.

“I saw Ray earlier tonight,” Katy said.

“I didn’t know he was back in town.”

“He just got in. He wants us to all go for dinner someplace tomorrow night.”

Kerry shrugged. “I don’t have anything happening.”

She didn’t know their grandfather nearly as well as she’d like to. He seemed to have the best of intentions in their doing things together like a real family, but when they actually got together for a meal or an outing, he never seemed very comfortable. It was as though they intimidated him or something, Kerry thought. Katy said it was just that he felt guilty for having abandoned their grandmother and Nettie.

“But at least he’s trying,” she’d always add. “So we’ve got to give him points for that.”

Kerry did, which was why she always agreed to getting together with him, even though it got so awkward sometimes.

“Look at these,” she said, picking up the jar of black stones that Rory had brought up earlier. “Rory gave them to me.”

Katy took the jar and held it up to get a closer look at the stones. “Where’d he get them?”

“I think they were in the pot-before it ended up with Lily.”

Katy touched the crow pendant hanging from her neck. She took one of the smooth pebbles out and rolled it on her palm.

“I think they’re pieces of the long ago,” she said. “Like in Jack’s stories.”

“What do you think they’re for?” Kerry asked.

“Well,” Katy drawled. “I’m guessing they’re like the
corbæ
answer for all things strange and mysterious.”

“They’re not for anything,”
Kerry
said, having heard it often enough in the past couple of months. “They just are.”

“You’ve been taking notes.”

“I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

“You and me both,” Katy said. She wiggled her toes in Kerry’s lap. “You know what I’d just love?”

Smiling, Kerry began to massage her sister’s feet.

“What makes people not believe?” she asked.

“Not believe in what?”

“corbæ. Magic. The Grace. All of it.”

Katy shrugged. “Maybe the same thing that makes them not believe in love. Because it scares them. Or they don’t want to be laughed at for believing it can be real. What brought that up?”

“I was just thinking about Rory and Annie. He doesn’t believe in magic, but he believes in love, and she’s just the opposite. It’s so sad.”

“You should just tell him that you like him-that’d make him forget all about Annie. I mean, it’s not like they were ever really an item or anything.”

“That wasn’t what I was talking about.”

“I know,” Katy said. “But I still think you should do it.”

“I’m going to let him work through this business with Annie first.”

Kerry stopped massaging her sister’s feet. They both pulled their legs up and looked at each other over the tops of their knees.

“It makes you think about our parents, though,” Kerry said after a moment. “How could our mom
not
have believed in magic? Where did she think all those people came from? That they just lived in cottages in the forest somewhere?”

“How could Jack not believe in love?” Katy asked in reply.

Kerry sighed. “Is it going to be like that for us?”

“Only if we let it,” Katy said.

Katy fell silent then and Kerry saw her eyes were filling with tears. Swinging her feet to the floor, Kerry scooted in close. She moved Katy’s legs out of the way and put her arms around her sister.

“I just miss him so much,” Katy said with a tremble in her voice.

Kerry didn’t have to ask who.

At least you got to know him enough to miss him, she thought. I didn’t even get that.

But she didn’t speak the words aloud. They’d only make Katy? feel worse. Instead, she took Katy’s hand and curled her sister’s fingers around the crow pendant that dangled between them. Then she held her close, letting Katy cry.

She took her own comfort from having a sister she could still get to know. At least it wasn’t too late for that.

Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming

Cody sat by a small fire in the high lonesome, way past the tree line, so far up in the mountains that there was only the sky left to climb. It was a quiet night so he heard the footsteps from a long way off. Smelling the air, he knew he was meant to hear them because the person approaching his fire could be as silent as the nightfall when she wanted. He looked up but didn’t speak as Margaret came into the firelight. She waited a moment, then lowered herself down onto a stone across the fire from him. “How’re you doing, Cody?” she asked.

He shrugged. “You’re a long way from home, darling. Come to have yourself a laugh at how I screwed up again?”

She shook her head. “When’re you going to understand that nobody’s got a problem with you. You’re the one with the chip on his shoulder and the only person who keeps stepping up to knock it off is your own self.”

“You reckon?”

“I think that pretty much sums it up.”

“Except you’re forgetting something,” Cody said. “You’re forgetting all the people who get hurt in the process.”

Margaret made no comment.

“Like that little granddaughter of Ray’s,” Cody went on. “What was I thinking?”

“What were you thinking?” Margaret asked.

“Damned if I know.” He looked out over the lower ranges of mountains, then slowly returned his gaze to her face. “No, I know what I was thinking. I was thinking, if the world’s going back to how it was in the first days, then it didn’t matter if one little girl with some of our blood in her gave up her life to make it happen. I told myself I wasn’t really sacrificing her. She was never going to have existed in the first place anyway-not if things had worked out the way I was thinking they would.”

“That’s hard,” Margaret told him.

Cody gave a slow nod. “I can’t even say that realizing how I was using her even changed my mind. That didn’t come until I finally figured out what Dominique was really after. Once I knew she wasn’t working on a return to the old days like I was, that she was only hungry for corbæ blood, I couldn’t be a part of it. We’ve had our differences, but even this old dog knows that the world doesn’t turn without the firstborn in it.”

They fell silent for awhile. Looked at each other through the thin trail of smoke that rose from the fire. Listened to the crackle of the wood as it burned.

“Raven says you’re not to blame,” Margaret said finally. “Says you’re just susceptible to things that move outside the world.”

“And what kinds of things would those be, darling?”

Margaret shrugged. “Spirits, I guess. Whatever they are, Raven says they were around before him. Says they’ve got their own agenda. Usually they just leave us alone, but every once in a while they start in on scheming, make plans for us that we can never understand.”

“Well, I sure don’t understand.”

Cody pulled a silver flask out of the inside pocket of his jacket and offered it to her.

“Sure,” she said.

He poured a couple of fingers of whiskey into a tin mug and passed it over, then took a swig from the flask.

Margaret took a sip. “Did you hear about Jack?” she asked.

Cody gave a slow nod. “Word travels fast.” He sighed. “Every time I get my hands on that damn pot I come away regretting what I’ve done, but I think maybe I regret this time the most.”

“I was told he chose to go.”

“There wouldn’t have been a choice necessary, darling, if I hadn’t been messing with things. I’m going to miss him.”

“We’ll all miss him.”

“That story his daughter tells, about him and Nettie finally meeting up in the medicine lands. You think it’s true?”

Margaret shrugged.

“Because I don’t remember the medicine lands.”

“No one does,” she said. “Not even Raven.”

“I didn’t even think it was, you know, a place. Not really.”

Margaret had another sip of whiskey.

“So what do you think, darling?” Cody asked. “Is that where we go when we die?”