The Veil (7 page)

He looked over at me and frowned slightly. “I didn’t think it was. Come on.”

He headed for the gate leading to the front walk, but I stepped in front of him before he could reach it.

“Gran doesn’t like houseguests,” I warned him.

But then the front door opened and Gran herself appeared in the doorway.

She looked right past me and stared at Lucas. Lucas stared back.

Gran sighed and shook her head resignedly. “Well, come in,” she said. “There’s no use just standing there gawking at me like a couple of chickens.” She turned and disappeared back inside.

Lucas walked through the gate, up the front steps, and through the front door after her.

Without a single, coherent thought in my head, I followed them both into the house.

——

“So, you’ve finally caught up to us, have you? Took you long enough.”

There was an unmistakable note of pride in Gran’s voice, as she set milk, sugar, and a plate of tea cookies on the table in front of us.

“How do you know each other?” I asked. Gran met my eyes briefly, then looked away as she concentrated on pouring tea. Lucas did not look at me. Instead, he leaned forward and addressed Gran.

“It would have been easier for all concerned,” he began, “if you hadn’t—”

“Hadn’t what?” Gran interrupted sharply, setting the kettle
down with such violence the table beneath it shook and tea sloshed over the sides of the delicate porcelain cup in front of me. “If I hadn’t taken her away? Hadn’t kept her safe for all of these years?” She made a scoffing sound deep inside her throat, and I drew in a breath; I’d never heard Gran make such a rude noise in my entire life. “What do you know about it, youngling? You’re not much older than she is.”

“Regardless, it’s important that she be kept safe—”

“What does it look like I’ve been doing?” she demanded. “What does she need your protection for when she has me?”

Lucas sighed and stared down at his steaming teacup without touching it. He didn’t say a word, but I could see the muscles in his jaw beginning to clench. Anger, or maybe it was just frustration, gave his already perfect profile an even sharper, more vivid line than usual.

I didn’t reach for my teacup either; my hands were shaking too badly for me to pick it up without spilling. I wanted to say something. But they both seemed intent on ignoring me.

Gran pursed her lips. When she spoke again, her voice had lost the rough, un-Granlike edge it had had just moments before. Her face was kind as she looked at Lucas. “She’s my responsibility, dear. She always has been. It’s what her mother wanted. I did what I thought was right at the time, and I haven’t ever looked back.”

Lucas raised his eyes to her again. “She doesn’t know, then?”

Gran shook her head, and I suddenly snapped out of whatever it was that had been keeping me silent.

“Know
what
?” I asked loudly. “What are you two talking about?”

But they both continued to ignore me.

“Do you mind telling me how it happened?” Gran asked, her eyes still locked on Lucas. “And when?”

“This past June,” Lucas answered gravely. “At the hospital.”

“Ahhh,” Gran smiled knowingly. “I
was
worried about that. I should have been more careful—my first lapse in eleven years.”

My head was spinning. June. I had started getting these horrible, sharp stomach pains and Gran had had to rush me to the hospital in the middle of the night to get my appendix taken out. That had been the first time since I got my driver’s license that I’d been in the passenger seat of Gran’s car.

“It wasn’t a total lapse,” Lucas’s voice shook me out of my thoughts. “Only you were seen.”

Gran froze. For a moment, she appeared totally unable to speak. Then she drew a deep breath. “I take it then, since you seem to have found her anyway, that she—”

“Yes,” Lucas said plainly.

Gran lowered her head for a moment. When she raised her chin back up, I could have sworn there were tears in her eyes. “Well then,” she said, and shook her head slightly. “That’s strange, I thought I would be . . . Well, there you go, I suppose.” Her expression tightened, and when she looked at Lucas again, it was with fear. “Do the Others know?”

Something about the way she’d said the name capitalized it inside my head, even back then, when I had no notion of what she was talking about.

“We don’t think so.”

Gran let out a sigh of relief.

“Hello?” I waved my hands in the air. “Did I suddenly disappear or something?”

Gran finally looked over at me. “Something like that, yes. Only not just now. You disappeared eleven years ago, Addy. And I was the one who took you.”

——

Lucas looked suddenly uncomfortable.

“I should. Um . . .”

He made a move to get up, but Gran stopped him with an outstretched hand and got to her feet instead. She walked slowly to the bookcase in the corner of the living room. She
stood before it for some time before reaching out and extracting a thin, leather volume.

When she came back over to us, she took the chair beside mine and opened the book so it was half in my lap, half in hers. She turned to Lucas. “You’re welcome to stay, so long as you do not interrupt. This is my story to tell, Guardian.”

Lucas nodded solemnly, picked up his tea, and settled back comfortably in his chair, across the table from us.

Rather than follow up on the strange name she’d just called Lucas, because that would inevitably cause me to begin pondering just what he was doing sitting at my dining room table, I looked down at the open photo album.

The picture Gran had opened to was familiar to me.

“This is you, with your mother and father,” she told me unnecessarily, as she’d shown me this picture many times over the years. I’d been about six months old when it was taken; I was sitting up, rather unsteadily, in the middle of a yellow checkered-pattern blanket. The first tufts of my strawberry blonde hair stuck out crazily in every direction. My parents posed on either side of me, each holding a supportive hand behind my back.

My mother had been freckled, just like me, but her hair had been a much deeper shade of red. My father had had very light blonde hair and his nose had been slightly too pointy, just like mine.

“And this,” Gran continued, flipping a few pages forward until she came to another picture that I had seen before, “is your grandmother.”

I looked down at the woman in the picture; the photo was old, so the colors were less than vivid, but it was still easy to tell she had flaming red hair, much darker than mine but exactly the same shade as my mother’s. I wondered why the similarity had never occurred to me before. I remember always thinking that the woman in this picture, who Gran had always described as her best friend, was remarkably small and thin, yet somehow still able to give off
the impression that she was as unbendable as a steel rod. There was something in her posture and her severe smile that conveyed a type of strength far beyond stubbornness. The woman was probably only in her mid-thirties, but her period hat and knee-length dress made her appear a bit older to my modern eyes.

“You always told me this was your best friend,” I reminded Gran. I couldn’t help the accusatory tone that crept into my voice. “And that she died.”

“It is. And she did.” Gran turned the page again, opening to another picture I was familiar with; it was of the same redhead, but this time she had her arm looped around the waist of another woman who looked to be about her age. The second woman was taller, with wavy dark hair and a face that was recognizably Gran’s, even though I had only ever known Gran as an old woman. The woman in the photo possessed the kind of beauty that made you believe she would never age; Gran had been a knockout.

“Your grandmother—your
real
grandmother—was my greatest friend,” Gran said, brushing the side of the redhead’s face with a careful finger. “She was the dearest person to me in all of the world. And that’s why I made a promise to her and to her daughter, that I would be the one to look after you if anything ever went wrong.”

“This is my real grandmother?” I scrutinized the woman next to Gran in the picture and frowned. “I don’t understand. Why don’t I remember her? Why didn’t I go to live with her after my parents died?”

“Because by then, your grandmother was already dead.”

She was leaving something out, I could tell. I looked over at Lucas; he was watching us quietly, sipping his tea, with absolutely no expression on his face. But his eyes looked sad—sad for me. But not the kind of sad I always got when people found out my parents had both died. This was a different sort of sad.

I turned back to Gran and to the picture of her standing beside my real grandmother. “Why did she die?” I asked. “Was she sick?”

Gran drew in a deep breath. “Your grandmother was murdered, Addy. By the same people who murdered your parents. The people who would’ve killed you too, if I hadn’t taken you away.”

I stared at her, suddenly feeling as though all of the air had been sucked out of my lungs.
Murdered
? I wasn’t a naïve person. At least, I didn’t like to think of myself that way. I watched the news. I knew there were people in the world who preyed on others and that people got murdered all of the time. But not here—not in the world that I lived in. It didn’t happen to people I knew. And now Gran was trying to tell me . . .

“No,” I said flatly. “My parents died in a fire. That’s what you’ve always told me.”

“They did. But the fire was not an accident. It was set deliberately.”

“But
why
?” I asked. “Who would do such a thing?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised what people would do,” Gran said. “Your grandmother was a very powerful woman, Addy. And powerful people often make just as many enemies as they do friends.”

“I don’t understand,” I told her.

“I know.” Her voice was gentle. “There is a lot to explain. Let me finish the story, all right? After your grandmother was killed, your parents were very worried about something happening to them and even more concerned about you. They went underground—even further underground than they’d been before. They’d always hidden you, Addy. Your parents’ first priority was always to keep you protected. But eventually, your mother began to have a very strong feeling they were about to be found out.

“The night before they died, she asked me to take you away. Just for a little while until things calmed down a bit. I came to their house. I watched you kiss your parents goodbye, and then you and I disappeared. I didn’t even tell your parents where I was taking you; they didn’t want to know. In case anyone tried to make them tell . . .” She trailed off, remembering. “I got the news the very next morning.
I had very little time to make a decision. Your grandmother and your parents had many friends,” her eyes flickered up in Lucas’s direction, “who would’ve gladly protected you. I could’ve brought you to them. I strongly considered it. But in the end, I thought the best way to protect you, the most complete way, was to hide you not just from your parents’ and your grandmother’s enemies, but from their friends as well. I thought it would be better if you and I simply left that world behind us completely.

“And so we did. I moved you here, and I’ve managed to keep you hidden for eleven years. And from the very first moment, the moment you put your little hand in mine and followed me out of your parents house on that dreadful night, I’ve loved you just as much as any woman has ever loved a real granddaughter—even more, I imagine. Because I’m one of the very few people in the world who know how truly special you are.”

Tears prickled my eyes. Putting all of my questions aside for the moment, I reached over and hugged her as tightly as I could. She hugged me back, and I could tell she was crying too.

When we finally let go, something Lucas had said earlier popped back into my head. “What’s my real name?” I asked her.

Gran smiled.

“Your real name is Addison Rose Prescott. But your parents never called you Addison when you were little, only Addy. Not many people knew you existed, and among those who did, only a few of us knew your name. So I thought you should keep at least some of the name that your parents gave you. Your last name was the only one I changed.”

“Why Russell?” I asked.

Gran’s smile widened.

“After Rosalind Russell. She was my favorite film star, back when I was your age.”

I thought for a minute, flipping through my mental inventory of the old movies Gran and I had watched together, over the
years. “She was in a movie with Cary Grant, right? Where they’re both reporters?”

“That’s my girl,” Gran said proudly.

We were silent for a moment. The lamp beside Lucas flickered, bouncing strange shadows off of his face. He sat quietly, still as a statue, watching us. I was surprised by how unobtrusive his presence was; maybe my Lucas radar was malfunctioning after being in such close proximity to him for this long.

Finally, I asked the question I’d been afraid to ask for more than twenty-four hours, because I didn’t want the answer to be “because you’re crazy.” I wasn’t absolutely sure the answer would relate to our current conversation, although a small part of my brain was forcefully trying to tell me it would, that it had to. In any case, it seemed like an appropriate moment to lay all of my cards on the table, so I blurted it out. “Why have I been seeing things nobody else does?”

Lucas set down his teacup and stood up from his chair. “My turn.”

——

I
DIDN
’
T WANT TO LEAVE
G
RAN
, not when I still had so many questions, but she rose from the table and pulled me up with her.

“He’ll explain things to you far better than I can,” she told me. “Go with him. You’ll be glad you did.”

Lucas, now at the front door, looked back over his shoulder at us. “Thank you for the tea,” he said to Gran, who nodded formally to him.

I walked over to him, and he held the door open for me.

“Back by ten o’clock, you two,” Gran called after us.