Wildcat Fireflies (22 page)

Tens and I worked in comfortable silence, unpacking the box, spreading the little paintings and drawings out on a big table. I studied them again, flipping through pages, squinting at faces. I felt like I should recognize something or someone. But other than a gut feeling that these had been painted by a Fenestra, I picked up nothing.

“Do you get any feeling from this stuff?” I asked Tens.

“I know you’re confused and worried.” He smiled. “But that’s because you’re biting your lips and sighing every three seconds.”

“Ha-ha.” I rolled my eyes.

Rumi pushed open the door and bounced in. “Ah, sorry for that. You’re quite the sales device. Sold a dozen for upcoming birthdays, bat mitzvahs, baby presents. How may I be of assistance today?”

“We didn’t mean to interrupt.” I licked my lips, wondering not for the first time if I needed to apologize for taking up his time.

“Not a problem.” He walked over to the table. “I see you’re intrigued by Ma’s keepings.” He bent over them,
smiling recognition at the pages as if they were long-lost friends come home. He lumbered to the kitchen. “Beverages?”

“Sure,” I said, and Tens nodded.

Rumi made coffee for himself and poured us sparkling juice in brightly swirled tumblers that made drinking feel like swallowing a rainbow. “Did you find anything interesting in there?”

I picked up a small crinkled-leather sketchbook. “Can you tell us what the writing says?”

He nodded, sipping thoughtfully. “Most of it I can translate. Some … I don’t understand well enough to give you the English equivalent.”

“Do you know who did all these?”

“Not all of them. Some were my nain’s.” He shuffled through pages and pointed to initials in the bottom corner. “This is her. These are in my da’s handwriting, but I didn’t know him to be an artist, so I think maybe he wrote on the finished work. Like I said, I pieced it together.”

“Whatever you tell us will be helpful,” Tens assured him.

Rumi and Tens shared a moment of eye contact I didn’t understand. “Give me a minute here to reread so I tell you correctly. Where’d I lay my paper?” He patted his pockets and glanced around, frazzled.

I found pad and pen between the couch cushions and handed them to him.

He jotted words down on fresh paper. Mumbled. Shook his head. Nodded.

Tens and I sat quietly and waited. The tension of not knowing strung my spine tight. I resisted the urge to tap my heels or my fingers

Finally, he said, “Let’s start here.” He sorted a stack out and gestured. “These papers all point to the summer solstice as the day Good Death appears. When young women step forward to take their places at the bonfires, to be anointed. This is when babies with the gift first cry. I’m guessing that means they’re born on the summer solstice too. It’s a big celebration, ancestors return. Bonfires and Good Death are mentioned here.” He tapped the examples.

I shot a glance at Tens.
Summer? That doesn’t make sense. If they’re Fenestra wouldn’t it be winter?

“Are you sure it says summer?” Tens questioned.

“A different season, maybe?” I asked.

“Definitely summer. Not easy to confuse summer with autumn or spring.”

“Winter?” My voice cracked.

He adamantly refuted, “Definitely not winter.”

“And it says that’s when babies are born with a gift?” Tens held up a page as if reading it himself would help the pieces fit together.

“Uh-huh. Why do I get the sense you were hoping for a specific answer to these questions?” Rumi rubbed his eyes and took another swallow of coffee so we could contemplate his question.

Tens gave him a small smile, a mere lift of his lips.

I puzzled to myself, “It’s
December
twenty-first. It’s the winter solstice.”
Fenestras are always born on the winter solstice
.

“For what?” Rumi tapped my shoulder.

“For— Did I say that out loud?”

“Nah, of course not.” Rumi must have seen something on my face because he decided at that moment he needed a beverage refill. Whistling, he walked over to the kitchen and turned on the faucet. I appreciated him trying to give us some semblance of privacy.

Tens leaned forward. “What if it’s not just December, Supergirl? What if there are more family lines out there? Your ancestors found the winter solstice as theirs, but wouldn’t it make sense that maybe others came to be on other dates?”

“What would that prove?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Tens shrugged and leaned away. “Hey, Rumi?”

“Yes.” Rumi turned off the water and leaned against the counter, his face open and calm.

Tens balanced his chair on its back legs, tipping himself precariously. He looked for all the world like a kid in detention for shooting spitballs. “Is there a birth date that’s popular in your family’s history?”

“Like do we all have birthdays around the summer solstice?” Rumi smiled. “You forget I’m a cagey old man. I’ve been trying to think. We’re mostly June babies. But not all of us celebrated birth dates like they do now. Not necessarily on the solstice, but maybe. Let me look here.” He went to a book stand and opened a massive book. “The family Bible. Generations of birth dates, marriages, and deaths in here.”

The book must have weighed forty pounds, but he
lifted it as if it were a handkerchief and set it on the table between Tens and me. “Look here.” He pointed.

We all leaned over the ancient parchment and tried to read the names and dates that branched around in a tree shape. If the words had been typed, the font size would have been a four.
Maybe
.

“I’m getting too antiquated to read this. Take a look without me.” Rumi sat back at the head of the table. Tens studied one side while I did the other.

“I count six,” he said.

“I see seven,” I finished.

“Plus, lots of them are close on one side or the other. And the weddings are on the twenty-first as well.”

Rumi whistled. “Interesting. Seems like a disproportionate number? Lots of harvest mating?”

I swallowed, not sure what to say, but it didn’t matter. Rumi continued as if he were having a conversation with himself.

Rumi tapped another little black book. “Here’s the next bit you should know. Might be something. Might be nothing. This belonged to my father’s brother, at least according to the writer. But I never knew him. I never even knew he existed until after Ma died and I read through all this.”

“Oh. But there could be all sorts of explanation for why they didn’t tell you—”

“That’s the part that’s bothered me. I knew about uncles and aunts that died as babies, or who were sent to the British colonies because they were criminals in the twentieth century—”

“They did that in the twentieth century?”

“Yep, didn’t really stop until mid-century or later. The poor and criminals got carted off in the Queen’s name. I knew about the ones who died in barroom brawls and at war. Even a leper.” He ticked off his fingers as if counting up the death stories.

“Big family?”

He agreed. “Yep, but family stories are family stories—they’d be brought up every reunion over whiskey or cake. I thought maybe I could have forgotten something, so I asked my sister, who has a head for facts and figures. She doesn’t remember hearing about this boy at all. Never. So I asked the rest of my living siblings.”

“And?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“No one’s ever heard of him.”

“Well, what does he say in the book?” I asked.

“I don’t know if he was moonstruck or making up stories, mind you. It’s hard to tell. He talked about dead animals. He used to cut them up and look at their insides. He was twisted, if what he wrote is true. But he looked forward to his birthday. In the last entry he was excited to be a man and take his place in the ritual.”

“What ritual?”

“I don’t know. But I know this, his birthday was June twenty-first and I can’t find any mention of him anywhere. Just this little book.”

A chill danced down my spine.

The phone rang deep in the cushions of a chair and
Rumi ambled over to answer it, upsetting the couch as he went.

Tens leaned into me. “Wouldn’t it be harder to spot Fenestras if they weren’t all born on the same day? What if different parts of the world or different families came into their own at different times?”

I followed his train of thought. “That way if the Nocti found them or they were wiped out by other forces, there wasn’t a trail to all of them. Like a terrorist cell—you only know what you know, but not enough to hurt anyone else?”

“I don’t think I’d compare Fenestras to terrorists, but yeah, that’s what I meant.”

“If he’s right, then Rumi
is
related to Fenestra.”

“Or Nocti.” Tens frowned down at the little black book.

W
e’d left Rumi working on translating more of the pieces; I needed food, a hot bath, and a little peace. Two out of three might be possible.

Tens slanted a glance at me in the truck cab. “Need a soak?”

My shoulders were knotted into macramé. Rubbing seemed to make them worse. “Maybe. Probably.”

“You okay?” Tens shut off the engine, but neither of us left the truck.

I shook my head. “No.”

“More words, please?” His lips twisted up as his fingers found the bare skin where my neck and shoulders met.

A shiver from the contact and his tiny smile had me sliding closer. I snuggled into the curve of his side while he wrapped his arm around me. I inhaled the heady scent of him before saying, “I keep thinking we’ll get to the place where we know what’s going on.”

“Hmm …”

“When are we going to know instead of guess? When will this whole thing be easy?”

“Which part?”

“The dying still mess with my energy, even though Auntie said I’d be able to control it.”

“She said it would take time and practice. It’s only been a month, Supergirl.”

Only a month?
Lifetimes filled that month. I felt like I lived in a dark box with no light, no clock, and no watch. Time lost all meaning. “And Fenestras—we thought we knew everyone’s birth date. I thought we were all girls. And now we find out—”

“Maybe there are more? And men can be Fenestra too?”

“Right?” I sat up and held eye contact. I thought of Señora Portalso, who’d ridden the bus from Portland to Revelation with me. She’d seen the light in me and recognized me as Fenestra before I even knew what was going on. She’d brought help and kindness to the caves without strings. What if she was like Rumi? And knew there were more beings like us between humanity and the Divine? “And maybe there are people who keep the secrets and
know this truth and help us? Like Rumi, human versions of Custos and Minerva? We had support, on the bus and then in the caves—”

“Señora wasn’t a coincidence, you mean?”

“How much of this is us being puppets for the big guys”—I nodded up at the heavens—“and how much is free will?” I used to believe I controlled my destiny, but the more I lived, the more I wondered if there was no such thing as coincidence.

“I—”

I interrupted him. “And us—the Protector mantle and my needing you doesn’t make this any easier.”

“What ‘this’?” He seemed baffled.

“This.” I motioned between his body and mine. He’d decided, notably without my consent, that I wasn’t ready to progress beyond kissing. In my mind, we’d long since gone past that stage—our bodies just hadn’t caught up yet. Maybe he was right, but maybe he wasn’t.

He echoed my gestures. “What ‘this’? I still don’t get it.”

I knew mature people actually conversed about sex and their needs. At least that’s what I thought they did, but faced with talking about sex, and naked antics, I wanted to bury my head in my hands, put my fingers in my ears, and sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” at the top of my lungs. Okay, so I’d bathed him while he was sick. He’d helped me. But awake and surging and sexy—we hadn’t tackled that. Why, I couldn’t say.

Tens seemed determined to keep us chaste and me virginal, but I knew I could push him past that if I pressed.
I just didn’t want to yet. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to make love with him, or that I had a moral objection to premarital sex; it was more that I knew it would complicate already insanely complicated reality. I wasn’t in a rush. Was I? Because it did royally piss me off that Tens hadn’t put the moves on me. He was way too upstanding to push, even if he was walking around with an eternal erection—which isn’t to say I’d noticed one. But then my crazy lack of relationship experience couldn’t fill a thimble, so what did I know?

Tens bracketed my face with his hands and forced eye contact. “Please?”

I fidgeted. “Are you not … um … Do you want to …” I broke off, my heart racing. What if he didn’t want to? What if all of this was just him feeling like he was stuck with me and he wasn’t attracted to me?

“Merry—”

“Sex.” I forced the word from my lungs and it sounded more like “sucks.”

He blinked, his hands squeezing reflexively before letting go of me. “This is about sex?”

I concentrated on picking up cracker crumbs stuck in the seams of the seat cushions. I nodded.

“What about it? Merry?” His voice deepened.

My mouth dry and my skin itchy, I couldn’t look at him.

“Supergirl? Do you feel pressure? I’ve been careful—”

“No, no.” I swallowed and sucked it up. He might laugh. He might agree with me. But that was no worse than continuing to think he found me as attractive as a tree stump. “Why haven’t we had sex?”

“What?” If the door to the truck had been open he’d have fallen out trying to get away.

Custos barked and leapt from the back of the truck, making the whole vehicle shake with the force.

Feeling bolder, I pressed. “Are you not attracted to me?”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this—” Tens’s expression rocked with incredulity. He rubbed his hands over his face and cracked the door. “Let’s go inside.”