The Soulkeepers (7 page)

Jacob had played some baseball when he was a
kid but he wasn't exceptionally good at it, which is why the flight
of doll number five came as a shock. The dolls head sprang from its
neck with astonishing force, the mouth molded into a tiny "o" that
took on new meaning as it rotated through the air and arced over
Rural Route One. For what seemed like forever, he could feel the
vibration of the impact in the cold metal pipe clutched in his
hands.

His mouth fell open as the wind lifted it
higher than its original trajectory, higher and higher still as if
it were gaining speed with distance, unaffected by gravity. The
Laudners had stopped yelling and were staring wide-eyed at the
amazing flight. Until, to his horror, it dove and with a
disturbingly loud crash shattered a stained glass window of the
neighboring Victorian.

In a hundred years, Jacob would never have
guessed a doll's head could have inflicted that kind of damage. He
stood in awe, staring at the undeniable wreckage around him. There
was nothing left to hit and no reason to continue. The sick was
gone.

Jacob dropped the pipe.

"You evil bastard!" Katrina charged at him
across the lawn.

"You called me an egg!" he screamed in her
face, pushing her hard in the chest. The fight didn't last long.
John inserted himself between the two, holding them in opposite
directions. His fingers hardened around Jacob's shoulder.

"Ho! What is this all about? What's going on
here?"

"Dad, what do you mean? You saw what he did!
Punish him!"

"Jacob," John said in an amazingly calm
voice, "What is this all about?"

"She called me an egg!" he snapped.

"What does that mean?" John asked.

"White on the outside and yellow in the
middle. I'm sick of people in this town calling me names. You're
all bigots! Why don't you just send me back where I belong?"

At the look on her father's face, Katrina
interjected, "I didn't call you—I just repeated it. Everyone's
saying it at school. I was just letting him know, Daddy."

John turned the full force of his stare on
Katrina. "I am too tall for you to try to pull the wool over my
eyes." He squared his shoulders between them. "Now listen up both
of you. Jacob is a member of this family and will be treated like
one. Katrina, if I ever hear you call Jacob a name again or in any
way degrade him, you will deal with me. Jacob, your behavior is
inexcusable. Those dolls were antiques given to Katrina by her
grandmother. They were worth hundreds of dollars each. You will
help me repair them. The ones we can't repair you will pay to have
repaired or replaced."

"I don't have any money."

"You'll earn the money," John boomed. His
thumb pointed at his chest. "My way."

Katrina turned back toward the house in the
arms of her weeping mother. Aunt Carolyn shot a look at him that
was meant to cut deep. But Jacob wasn't sorry—not at all.

He rubbed his shoulder where John had
released his grip.

John shook his head and turned away.
"Collect the bodies and heads and put them in my workshop. I need
to talk to Dr. Silva. Someone's gonna have to pay for that
window."

He walked away, moving down the driveway and
into the street. He didn't need to go far.

"Dr. Silva?" Jacob muttered.

The door to the Victorian opened. A woman in
a floor length black coat descended the stone steps. The wind
circled her, the dead leaves framing the billow of her cloak as she
descended. Wisps of platinum blonde hair floated around her as she
moved. She was tall and thin, a runway model, a goddess.

She was exactly the woman Jacob had seen out
his window.

The last doll's head dangled from her
fingertips. She crossed the yard and met John in the street, a grim
expression on her face. Jacob watched her lips move but couldn't
hear what she was saying. Uncle John responded with an occasional
head nod.

Panic rose like bile in his gut. She was
horrifically beautiful, just as he remembered, and she was looking
at Jacob. He remembered the drowning feeling. He remembered falling
under the weight of…those eyes. The color of a winter sky, they
pierced his flesh and his knees began to shake. John's head bobbed.
They had come to some kind of an agreement and then the woman came
for Jacob.

She left John's side, and closed the
distance between them with unworldly grace. The cloak she wore
concealed her feet, giving her the ethereal appearance of floating
over the pavement. When she was upon him and at an angle where John
couldn't possibly see her expression, her scowl melted into a
crooked smile and her brow arched.

The smell of freshly baked cookies
surrounded her, like her pockets were full of chocolate chips and
brown sugar. Jacob inhaled deeply and knew it was a weird thing to
do. He was sure it wasn't polite to smell someone you just met. His
palms began to sweat. Zaps of electricity ran the course of his
body, a feeling he didn't quite understand. He was equally tempted
to kiss her as to run.

Even as Jacob felt it, this strong
attraction, he knew it was wrong. She looked young, maybe
twenty-six, but he knew she must be older. John had called her
"Doctor Silva". Jacob tried not to think about how she made him
feel. He tried not to think about anything.

She laughed at him, a hollow sound like
frozen wind chimes. Over the heap of bodies in his arms, she
dangled the fifth dolls head. She tilted her head slightly as she
dropped it on the pile.

In a voice that oozed over her lips like
warm honey, she said, "I believe this belongs to you."

A Possible Life
Sentence

If there were a contest for the worst
possible time to have to urinate, Jacob would've won. Once the
surge of adrenaline had passed, the awkward bandaging session with
Aunt Carolyn had begun. All of the glass was picked out of his arm,
which was now covered in ample amounts of gauze. Then, he was
instructed to sit in the living room because Uncle John wanted to
talk to him about his punishment. Jacob wasn't sure how long he'd
waited in the sage green recliner but it was long enough to make
him feel like he needed to pee at the exact moment the man sat
down. Based on the frown on Uncle John's face, he decided not to
get up.

"So, here's how it's gonna be," Uncle John
began. "I think we can fix three of the dolls by hand. We'll snap
their heads back on and touch them up with some fresh hobby paint.
The china dolls are obviously beyond repair. You will help find
replacements and earn the money to buy them for Katrina."

Jacob nodded. Even though he felt Katrina
got what she deserved, he knew there would be consequences. It was
time to pay the piper. As he saw it, the good news was that the way
he earned the money to pay for the dolls could become the way he
earned a ticket home. Even working in the shop a few weeks would be
worth it, if it got him out of Paris.

"Now there's the issue of the window. I've
spoken to Dr. Silva and she thinks insurance will cover it but you
will have to pay her deductible. It's one thousand dollars."

"A thousand dollars?" Jacob winced.

"Jacob, that house was built in 1850. That
window was leaded glass. I was as surprised as you were that it
broke, but it did and it was expensive."

"What do I have to do?"

"Dr. Silva has a garden out back and a
greenhouse. Usually this time of year she hires some help to spread
fertilizer, plant seeds—that sort of thing. It's really more of a
hobby but she has a large collection of rare and unusual plants
that she's amassed during her tenure."

"Her tenure?"

"She's a professor of Ethnobotany at the
University of Illinois."

"I don't even know what that is."

"Ethnobotany is the study of how people
around the world use plants as part of their culture. She told me
once that she found a root in Tibet that was used there for
centuries to cure headaches. She brought a piece of it back to the
United States, analyzed it, and a pharmaceutical company thinks
they can make a new migraine medicine from it. She's really, um,
fascinating." John's eyes twinkled and Jacob wondered if Dr. Silva
had the same affect on his uncle as she did on him. What was it
about her? Yeah, she was beautiful but he'd seen plenty of gorgeous
women on the beach where he came from. It wasn't like she was
showing skin or in any way acting suggestively. So, why did he feel
such an intense physical attraction towards her? It was
like…magic.

"She has an extraordinary garden," John
continued, "but it's too much work for one person. So, this year
she'll have you."

Jacob's skin went clammy.

"She's agreed to pay you seven dollars an
hour for your labor and will employ you until such time as you pay
off your debt or longer if you agree to it. It's actually a great
opportunity. Her work is known throughout the world. You may get to
see some of it first hand."

Jacob shifted in his seat. He was trying to
be mature about this, but the truth was he was terrified of the
woman. He was sure she was a witch or something. He wondered if the
night he'd seen her out his window was a hallucination at all.

"A professor, huh." Jacob searched for the
words. "She seems really… young."

"You noticed. They say she's brilliant.
Graduated college top of her class at seventeen. I think she's
around thirty now. She moved here about ten years ago. Mostly keeps
to herself."

"So, what's with the black cloak? It's…
creepy."

"Yeah, I guess she's a little eccentric. I
mean, I can see why you might think that with the way she dresses
and all. But if she makes you uncomfortable, you should have
thought of that before you broke her window." John's eyebrows
arched and the muscle in his jaw tightened. He pushed his plaid
sleeves up to his elbows and threaded his fingers over his stomach.
"You know, I knew her grandmother. She lived there before Abigail
moved in. She was quite a looker. Even when she got old, really
beautiful." John was staring towards the fireplace, not looking at
anything in particular.

Jacob searched his brain for something to
say, any excuse to escape having to work for Dr. Silva. But nothing
came to him. It was as if his brain were hiding in a corner of his
head, inaccessible, a blank slate, and no help at all.

"You start Saturday." He
got up from the chair and turned toward the staircase. "Oh, and
Jacob, you and Katrina
will
apologize to each other. I'm going to talk with
her right now. This thing between you two has got to stop. You are
part of this family now—that goes for you and that goes for her.
You two have got to start treating each other like family or this
is going to be hell on earth for all of us."

As John jogged up the stairs, Jacob rose
from the sage green recliner and headed for the bathroom. On his
way, he crossed in front of the large bay window. The world beyond
was disguised as an early spring day but he knew it was as
turbulent as ever. Why hadn't John used this as an excuse to force
him to work in the Launders' flower shop? That Jacob would have
expected, but not this. This smacked of disaster.

There was definitely something odd, if not
dangerous, about Dr. Abigail Silva. Jacob caught sight of her
across the street, lying upside-down on a rocking chair on her
front porch. Her bare ankles were crossed where her head should
have been and her fingers dangled above the porch floor. At once,
he realized she was looking at him, those blue eyes searching his
face across the distance. And then, as if she had more muscles and
joints than the average human, she planted her hands on the blue
wood of the porch and flipped her feet over her head, landing
easily on the balls of her feet. Jacob watched as she rose to her
full height and leaned over the porch rail. Distance and glass
couldn't mellow her effect and the spice of terror and longing
filled him, a confusing concoction that made his whole body
clench.

She grinned, like the cat that was about to
eat the canary.

Moon Tea And
Somali

As agreed, Jacob met with Dr. Silva the
following Saturday to discuss his new responsibilities. He dreaded
the encounter to the point he had to force himself up each of the
inlaid stone steps, his shaking knees betraying his fear as he
knocked tentatively on the heavy wooden door. But the Victorian was
full of surprises. For one, the inside was as warm and cozy as the
outside was cold and foreboding. Dr. Silva had welcomed him into a
room she called a parlor near the rear of the house decorated in
honey brown leather and burgundy plaid with a lively fire burning
beneath a gold mantel. Dr. Silva's cat, a large red Somali that
looked like a fox, took an unnatural interest in Jacob, following
at his heels and guarding his every move. Dr. Silva said it was the
breed; Somalis were known for their loyalty and Gideon, as the cat
was called, was not accustomed to strangers.

But perhaps the greatest surprise was that
despite Dr. Silva's casual manner and that she'd forgone her black
coat for a sweatshirt and khaki pants, Jacob remained horrified by
her presence. The touch of her hand when they greeted one another
was enough to send a charge of electric current coursing through
his body, and set every hair on end. It was embarrassing, but Jacob
felt powerless to fight it.

"Before we get started, I think it would be
a good idea for us to get to know each other." Dr. Silva lowered
her chin and stared at Jacob until he felt a bead of sweat drip
down his temple. "Would you like some tea?"

He nodded. As if he had any other choice but
to say yes. She moved like grace personified, practically gliding
to the kitchen. In less time than it would've taken him to walk
there and back, she returned with two steaming cups. He took a sip
with shaky hands, trying his best not to spill any on himself.
Around the flavor of oolong tea, he could make out a trace of mango
twisted with cinnamon and coconut. The after taste was—what was it?
Pumpkin. Clearly, pumpkin.