The Veil (10 page)

I jumped suddenly as something brushed my calf, and I looked down to find Rialto rubbing his head against my leg.

“And Rialto makes eleven,” Gran said, setting the orange juice down and bending to pick him up. “Rialto is a
real
cat, of course. I found him outside right after we moved here. Just a little kitten he was then, shivering underneath a drainpipe. That’s where I got the idea of how to hide my boys.”

Before I could form any kind of coherent response to that, Gran set Rialto down. He bounded over to the table and leapt into the lap of a burly man with long, orange hair and a braided moustache of the same color.

“Yep,” the man said, scratching Rialto under the chin. “Rialto here is just a plain old cat. Taught us all how to act like proper ones too.”

“Yeah,” said an even larger man across the table, who was entirely bald except for a small tuft of hair on the very top of his shiny head. The (nearly) bald man chuckled and shoved a forkful of eggs into his mouth, swallowed, and then added, “
He’s
no Annorasi.”

I frowned. “Anno what?”

Lucas stood up from the table and threw a mock glare at Baldy. “You’re stealing my thunder, friend. Come on, Addy. I know a quieter place where we can talk.”

Gran’s “boys,” still chuckling over Baldy’s incomprehensible joke, laughed even harder at my puzzled expression, and suddenly I didn’t feel like going
anywhere
. I put my hands on my hips and dug my heels into the linoleum floor.

“Why can’t we just talk here?” I asked Lucas. “Why do we have to go somewhere else?”

“Because I have housework to do,” Gran cut in, appearing suddenly at my elbow with a large wicker basket. “And you two will just get in the way if you’re here.” When I didn’t reach out for the basket, she thrust it into my arms. “Lunch,” she said. “And enough for dinner too. Don’t let him bring you back here until he answers
all
of your questions, Addy, you hear me? All of them. But
ten o’clock at the latest, of course. That’s another of the terms in my boys’ employment contracts.”

Lucas took the picnic basket from me and motioned toward the door. “I think you’ll like where we’re going,” he said. When I didn’t budge, he shrugged. “But it’s up to you. We can do whatever you want.”

I took one last, hesitant glance at the table of rowdy men who, up until quite recently, I’d known only as cats. A horrible thought occurred to me, and I grimaced as I remembered the hundreds of times I’d casually changed my clothes while one or more of them had been in the room. How was I supposed to have known I shouldn’t have been doing such things in front of
these
cats?

My cheeks were on fire as I turned back to Lucas.

“Let’s go,” I said, giving Gran a quick hug before practically sprinting out of the house.

——

“The cat thing really threw you, huh?” Lucas, driving my car again, made a right turn onto Grant Avenue. For a moment, I thought he was taking us to school. But when the whitewashed walls of Marin County High came into view, he drove right past them toward the edge of town. The world outside my window got progressively greener and more wildernesslike as we passed several jogging trails and a golf course.

My ringing cell phone saved me from having to answer his question. I pulled it out of my purse, saw it was Olivia calling, and groaned. “Damn,” I said, hitting
Ignore
. I could hardly talk to her with Lucas sitting two feet to my left. “I forgot to call her back after I talked to Nate this morning.”

Lucas hit the brakes hard. I braced myself against the armrest on the passenger door as he swerved before coming to a dead stop in the gravel on the side of the road.

His eyes blazed as he turned to look at me. “What did you talk about? What did you say?”

“What? When?” I gripped the armrest harder and squirmed up against the side of the car; Lucas’s voice had completely lost its alluring, almost musical tone. Now it was harsh and accusatory and, together with the stony look on his face, quite frightening.

He looked away from me and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, they were marginally less scary and his voice sounded calmer. “With Nate. What did you talk about with Nate this morning?”

“I . . . uh, I apologized for ditching him at the rally yesterday.”

“Did you tell him about last night?”

“Sort of . . .”

His eyes started to look angry again.

“I only said I was with you!” I said defensively. “He
saw
us leaving the rally together.”

“But you didn’t tell him what we did? What you saw?”

“No.”

“What else did you tell him?”

“That I was going to be with you today,” I confessed.

“That’s it? You didn’t tell him what we’d be doing?”

“I don’t
know
what we’re going to be doing, Lucas.”

He closed his eyes again. “Of course not,” he muttered to himself. With his eyes still closed, he asked, “Why didn’t you tell him?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t think he’d believe me.”

Lucas smiled and opened his eyes again. When they met mine, they were their normal green, and his face had relaxed into his usual expression of relaxed perfection. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not you I’m mad at. It’s me. I forgot to tell you yesterday how important it is that you keep these conversations, these experiences, just between us. I can’t overemphasize how important it is, Addy, that you do not tell Nate or anybody else the things I tell you.”

In spite of the seriousness that had crept back into his voice, I bit back a smile at the cloak-and-dagger talk. Did he really think I was going to go around telling people about seeing visions, lifting
veils, and Gran’s ability to stir a pot with no hands? Did he think I was crazy?

“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I’m pretty sure if I told anyone about the kinds of things we talk about, I’d be forced to live out the rest of my days medicated, drooling at a wall in an institution somewhere.”

He shook his head. “Not all of your days,” he promised. “I’d come to your rescue eventually.”

Lucas eased the car back on the road again but turned off just a few minutes later into the parking lot of Stafford Lake, a reservoir with a picnic area that is a popular spot for birthday parties and sports-team banquets. I’d been there many times over the years. There were several groups of people in the picnic area now; one of them took up six of the eight public barbeques with a large tent and a banner that read, “Freeman Family Reunion.”

Lucas and I brought our picnic basket to a table on the opposite side of the park from the Freemans, and a good distance from all of the other, smaller groups. He set the basket on the table’s back bench and sat on the table itself, facing the lake. I sat an arm’s length away from him, also looking out into the water. It was a crisp day, but very sunny, and I squinted as I watched the light bounce off of the water.

Neither of us spoke for several minutes. I didn’t know what to say. He’d brought me here, after all, to explain things to me, so I thought maybe I should let him start. But all of a sudden, he seemed strangely reluctant to talk.

I looked over at him; the sun made his hair looked lighter than usual, like he had light brown highlights in his chocolate brown locks. He looked like he was deep in thought. His eyes were half closed against the glare, just as mine were, and it occurred to me we both probably should have thought to bring sunglasses.

I let several more minutes go by before I blurted out the thought that had been bouncing around my head for the entire drive here. “Is Gran a witch?”

Lucas frowned; this was clearly not where he would have chosen to begin.

“We don’t use that term, no,” he said.

“Ahhh. ‘We’ again,” I muttered. Then I thought of something else. “One of the men in the kitchen said something weird this morning—Anno something.”

“Annorasi,” Lucas supplied.

“Annorasi,” I repeated, letting the unfamiliar word roll over my tongue. “What’s that about?”

“It’s the answer to who ‘we’ is—are.” Lucas puzzled over the grammar for a moment. “Gran, me, the men in your kitchen this morning—we are all Annorasi. The world you’ve been seeing lately, the one behind the veil, that’s our world, the Annorasi world.”

“But not
my
world,” I said, letting only a hint of a question enter my voice.

“We’ll get back to that,” Lucas promised. “First, I want you to understand that the Annorasi are not human. We’re close, but not the same. Our world overlaps with the world you’re used to, and some of us live among humans, but we have abilities humans do not. And we keep our world a secret, just like I was telling you in the car just now.”

“Abilities,” I mused. “Like what? Like turning yourselves into cats?”

He wrinkled his nose. “I’ve never tried turning myself into an animal,” he said. “Every Annorasi is a bit different. Your Gran seems to use her magic mostly for cooking—to great effect, I might add. Breakfast was incredible.”

“And what about you?”

“I’m a
terrible
cook.”

“That’s
not
what I mean.”

He hesitated, looking around the lake. The Freeman family reunion was too far away to see us, and none of the other occupied tables seemed to be paying any attention to us. “If I show you, it might freak you out.”

“Try me,” I dared.

He shrugged. “Okay.”

And then he disappeared.

I gasped, and gripped the edge of the table. A small part of me wanted to run away, but most of me was afraid to move. What if he was still here—invisible, but still there? What if I bumped into him?

Before I could give it too much thought, he reappeared. Exactly in the same place he’d been moments before.

“So that’s your ability?” I said, trying to make my voice sound casual. My words still came out sounding a bit strangled.

“It’s one of them,” he said, with a touch of smugness.

“What are the other ones?”

He shook his head. “Let’s get back to you. There are a couple more things I need to explain.”

“Okay . . .” I prompted.

Lucas looked away from me. Suddenly he seemed hesitant again. He sighed heavily, as though steeling himself. It reminded me of how I sometimes have to psych up before forcing myself to do my precalc homework, or something similarly unpleasant. “Do you see that?” he asked finally, pointing out into the lake.

I followed the direction of his outstretched arm and nodded, assuming he was referring to the large, barren island in the center of the lake.

“No, I mean, do you
see
it?” he persisted. “The way you saw the bay last night. Do you need me to take you through Lifting the Veil again, or do you want to try it on your own?”

“Let me try,” I said, closing my eyes.

“Try looking at just the shoreline first,” he added hurriedly. “
Just
the shoreline, okay?”

“All right,” I agreed, slightly puzzled at the sudden note of stress in his voice. I took a deep breath and repeated the exercise he’d taught me the night before.

When I opened my eyes, the sun was even brighter, although
it somehow hurt my eyes less. There were silver streaks running through the water and small silver waves crashing onto shore. Half a dozen fish leapt out of the water and caught the sun, their scales reflecting the golden rays. Or perhaps the fish were gold to begin with. I was too far away to tell. Regardless, I found myself smiling at the tranquil scene.

But my enjoyment was not to last long. My first solid inkling that something bad was about to happen came from Lucas’s next words; his voice was gruff and heavy, and he spoke slowly, as though he was already regretting what he had to say.

“Now look at the island.”

I raised my eyes to the middle of the lake.

The island was still there, but it was nothing like the rocky outcrop, sprinkled with sparse patches of grass, that I’d seen a moment ago. The island in this world, the
Annorasi
world, was frightening.

To this day, I still have trouble describing exactly what I saw that morning. Part of the problem is the difficulty of conveying accurately what Annorasi buildings look like to those who have never actually seen one. I’m always tempted to say, as I did while describing the fortress at Ghirardelli Square, that they’re made of light. But that’s not precisely true. They’re actually made of metal. The woven silver and gold make up the physical “bones” of Annorasi buildings. But it’s the light reflecting off of the metal that creates their actual
structure
, like mortar holding together bricks. Without the light, Annorasi buildings would crumble.

And that was what had happened to the building on the island. It looked like someone had sucked the light right out of it, so suddenly and so violently it left behind only twisted clumps of dark, lifeless metal. The shards reached jaggedly upward, frozen in a desperate attempt to hold onto the light.

It was dark around the ruin, but the darkness didn’t bother me nearly as much as the
absence
of the light. The only bits of brightness that remained were small trickles of the same eerie yellow-green I’d
seen in the rally bonfire. But this type of light seemed only to add to the dark, rather than illuminate it.

And the building, whatever it had been, was not the only thing that had been destroyed here. On the far edge of the ruin, just beyond where the dark water lapped onto shore, were row upon row of small, square, metal markers that could only be graves.

Up until then, most of my glimpses of the Annorasi world had been beautiful. Some, like the cougar and the light-fortress in Ghirardelli Square, had been startling. But it had not been the visions themselves that had scared me, more the fact that they had appeared in front of me without explanation. But the island in the lake . . . this was more like the people burning in the bonfire. The threads of yellow-green flames matched the flames in the bonfire exactly, and the whole scene made me feel exactly like the bonfire had: scared and powerless, like I was alone in the dark.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and Lucas’s voice (back to normal now and smooth as silk) was in my ear.