Ysabel (24 page)

He was almost shouting. Greg, perhaps still half asleep, perhaps not, was watchful and quiet after Ned and Kate finished their story. He was eyeing Aunt Kim and Ned’s father, waiting to see what they did.

“They aren’t allowed to kill each other?” Kim said.

Ned shook his head. “That’s what she said. Not while they look for her.”

“She gave them that set time to find her,” said Kate. “Three days.”

“It would be three,” Aunt Kim said. “But she’s doing something differently, I think. Sounds as though they would fight for her, normally.”

“Maybe not,” Kate said, hesitantly. “It seemed as if sometimes she just . . . chooses one, and then there’s a war. In revenge, maybe?” They all stared at her. She flushed, looked at Kimberly. “But this was different. I think they were both surprised.”

“So what does it mean, if it’s different?” Edward Marriner asked.

“I’m not sure,” Aunt Kim admitted.

“Then what do we do?” Greg asked.

“You
know
what we do now! This isn’t goddamned Scooby-Doo!” Steve glared around the table. “We make a call, for God’s sake! Melanie’s been kidnapped and we aren’t detectives!”

“She’s been changed, not kidnapped,” Kim said calmly. “Steven, Steve, the gendarmes will have no possible way of dealing with this.”

“And we do?” Steve said, his voice rising. “I mean, way I make this, Ned and his friend saw some whacko cult, pagans or Wiccans or whatever, faking a ritual, and Melanie got grabbed when she walked in and interrupted them.” He looked at Ned. “Admit it. You could have missed what really went down. You said there were fires and smoke.”

“I wish,” Ned said. He felt miserable. “Steve, I do. But too many things have happened. I mean, Aunt Kim and I
saw
the guy—Cadell—with stag horns, and then he changed into an owl.”

Steve stared at him.

“And Melanie never disappeared,” Ned added, after a moment. “I saw her all the way. I could see really clearly up there. I don’t know why. She just changed, as she walked between the fires.”

“Jesus! I’m supposed to . . .
we’re
supposed to believe that?”

“I think we may have to, Steve,” said Edward Marriner, slowly. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but something inexplicable seems to be going on. I think we let Dr. Ford—Kim—guide us here.”

“Why’s that?” Greg asked, but quietly.

Kim looked at him. “I’ve seen this before,” she said. “Long time ago. Not identical, nothing’s ever quite the same. But I can tell you that Ned and I . . . our family . . . have a connection to this sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?” Greg again, still calmly.

“Call it Celtic, pagan, supernatural. Pick the word that works for you.”

“And if
none
of them work?” Steve asked, but his voice had softened. Aunt Kim was pretty hard to yell at, Ned thought.

She smiled wryly at Steve. “Not even ‘idiotic mumbo-jumbo’?”

Steve looked at her. His expression changed. “Maybe that one,” he said. “That might do.” He hesitated. “What do you want, then? How do we get her back?”

“Yeah. What do we do?” said Greg. “Tell us, we’ll do it. Right now.”

They were assuming they
could
do something, Ned thought. He glanced at Kate, saw her looking back at him.

The others hadn’t seen Ysabel, or the two men facing each other among the ruins. Or the bull being led between flames. Ned wasn’t sure about doing anything useful at all. He felt sick, thinking about that.

From inside the house, just then, as the sun was going down at the end of a day, the telephone rang.

Ned looked quickly at his watch. So did his father.

“Oh, bloody hell,” said Edward Marriner, with feeling.

Listening to the ring, Ned corrected his earlier thought.
One
person could—probably would—find it extremely easy to yell at Aunt Kim, and disbelieve her, too.

He and his father exchanged a glance. Ned, feeling an emotion he couldn’t immediately identify, said, “I’ll get this one.” His father, halfway to his feet, subsided into his chair again. In a way, that was a surprise. In
another way, it wasn’t: this wouldn’t be a conversation he’d rush to have.

His heart beating fast again, Ned went in, crossed to the dining room, and picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hi, sweetie, it’s me!”

The connection to Africa was really good again. It was weird somehow; you expected a war zone to have crackly, broken-up phone lines.

Ned took a breath. “Hi, Mom. Listen. You have to listen carefully. We need you here. Fast as you can. Melanie’s disappeared. Some totally weird things are happening. I can’t even explain on the phone. Aunt Kim’s come to help, but we need you. Please, Mom, will you come?”

It poured out in pretty much one breathless rush. In retrospect, he probably could have found a smarter way of telling her, but he was really scared, and wound up, and there wasn’t an easy way to do any of this. And he hadn’t expected to ask for her, not in that way, like a child.

There was a silence on the other end of the line, not surprisingly.

He heard her intake of breath. “Ned, did you just tell me that your
aunt
is there?”

He said, “Mom, what I said was that I need you. Did you hear that part?” Now that he’d said it, he realized he
really
wanted her here.

“Edward, where’s your father?” She called him Edward only when it was
really
serious.

“On the terrace. We’re trying to figure out what to do. Mom, I told you, Melanie’s gone.”

“Do I have this right? Kimberly, my
sister
, is with you? In France?”

She sounded a bit in shock, actually.

“Yes, Mom. We need her, too. With what’s happening.”

His mother swore. It was pretty remarkable. “Get me your father, please. Right away.”

He took a breath again. “No,” he said.

“What?”

“Not till you say you heard me, Mom.”

“I’m hearing you just fine. I heard that—”

“Mom. I’m fifteen. I’m not a kid, and I’m asking for my
mother
to come help me. Think about that. Please.”

Another silence. A release of breath from far away.

“Oh, dear. Oh, sweetie. Forgive me. I’m . . . pretty stunned. But all right, I’m on my way. Fast as I can get there. Soon as I’m off the phone I’ll set it up.”

For like the fifth time today or something he felt like crying. Maybe he
was
still a kid. “Jeez. Thanks, Mom. Really. I love you.”

“I love you, too. Now will you get your father, please?”

“I think he’s scared to talk to you.”

“I’m sure he is.”

He knew that tone. “I’ll go get him. See you soon.”

“Soon, honey.”

He went back out. His father looked up, so did Aunt Kim. Both looked remarkably nervous.

“She wants to talk to Dad.”

His father stood up.

“She knows I’m here?” his aunt asked.

Ned nodded. “I asked her to come.”

They stared at him. Neither spoke for a moment.

“Is she?” his father said finally.

“She says so, yeah.”

“How nice,” Aunt Kim said, in a voice that was kind of hard to read.

His father went inside. Ned looked at his aunt. She was fishing a cellphone from her bag. “Uncle Dave?” he asked.

“God, yes,” she said, nodding her head. “You have no idea how much I want him here right now.”

Ned hesitated. “I might. You said so the other night. He wouldn’t come if my mom had stayed there, right? He’d have stayed with her?”

Aunt Kim held her phone and looked thoughtfully at him.

“Ned Marriner, is
that
why you asked Meghan to—”

“No! I really want her. She’s good, my mom, when things need figuring out. But I also thought, from what you said, that Uncle Dave . . . that we might need . . .”

He trailed off.

His aunt was staring at him. So were Steve and Greg. And Kate, he realized.

Aunt Kim smiled suddenly. She looked really pretty when she did, he thought. You could see what she might have been like when she was younger. She shook her head a little, seemed about to say something else, but didn’t.

She took her phone and walked along the terrace towards the sunset. They heard her greet someone, then she went around the corner of the house and they couldn’t hear any more.

There was a silence around the table. It was chillier now, with the day ending. Steve was bare-chested, wrapped in his towel. He had to be cold. Ned looked at the eastern trees beyond the driveway and the red car and the green wire fence. The moon would rise soon. For the second time.

“Do we tell her parents?”

It was Greg, and after a moment Ned realized the question was addressed to him, as if he was the one who should know, or decide. Steve was looking at him, as well, waiting for an answer. That was pretty tough to deal with. So was the worry on their faces. You had to call it fear, really. He didn’t know the exact relationships among his father’s team, but Melanie would be someone they cared about. A lot.

“Um, we’ll see what Aunt Kim says, but I think—”

“I think we have to wait three days,” Kate said, unexpectedly. “If we can.”

“Three, because . . . ?” Steve asked.

Kate looked pale and anxious, but determined. “Three, because what are you going to
say
to them? And because that’s how long she gave the men to find her.”

“And why does that decide it?”

It was difficult, knowing this, but he did seem to know it. He had been there, on the plateau. “Because if
we have any hope of getting Melanie back, it’s by finding her before either of them does.”

“Christ!” snapped Steve, standing up in his towel and bathing suit. “Is this hide-and-seek or James Bond? What do we do if we find her? Ask her pretty please to change back, and don’t forget the green streak in her hair?”

Ned glared at him. “How the hell do I know? What do you want me to say?”

Greg looked from one to the other of them. He held up his hands in a “T” for time out. “We’ll fall off that bridge when we cross it,” he said.

Ned managed a shrug, but he was still mad. Really. What did they
expect
from him?

Steve was looking at him. “Sorry,” he said, sitting down again. “My bad. I’m freaked. I have no idea how to act.”

“None of us do,” Kate said. “Unless maybe Ned’s aunt?”

“It’s like going to war,” Greg murmured. He scratched his beard. “How can you know how you’ll behave, or anything like that?”

They heard a footfall. Ned’s father was in the doorway to the kitchen. He stood there, shaking his head. “I have no idea what you said,” he murmured to Ned, “but she
is
coming. And she didn’t explode.”

“Not on the phone,” Ned said.

His father considered that. “Right. Not on the phone.”

“How’s she getting here?” Ned asked.

“She thinks she can get to Khartoum tonight on a UN food plane, then to Paris in the morning. Then down here.”

“So, like, late afternoon? Evening?”

“That’s right,” his father said. “She’ll phone.”

“I’m missing something,” Greg said. “Why would Dr. Marriner explode? That’s not her style.”

Another footfall, from the far end of the terrace. Aunt Kim walked back. They all turned that way. The sun was behind her, almost down.

“Dave’s coming,” she said. “He’s going to try for a military flight to anywhere in Europe tonight. Then connect.” She stopped as she saw them staring at her.

“Ah,” she said. “And Meghan’s on her way?”

Edward Marriner nodded.

“How nice,” said Kim, again.

CHAPTER XI

N
ed had forgotten about the van. They had to go back for it. Greg had a second set of keys, Aunt Kim had her car.

Ned said he’d go with them.

His father looked as if he wanted to veto that, but Ned was the one who knew where the van was, and it was getting dark. The approach of night made them decide to take off right away.

“Please come straight back. Would you like to sleep here tonight?” Edward Marriner asked his sister-in-law.

Kim nodded. “I think I should. Kate, do you want to stay with us? Or have you had enough of this?”

Kate hesitated, then shook her head. “I’ll stay. If there’s room for me? I can call and say I’m overnighting with a friend.” She gave Ned a look, and shrugged. “Marie-Chantal does it all the time.”

“She’ll be jealous,” he said, half-heartedly. He was thinking that it was Beltaine eve now.

“Only if I say it’s with a guy,” she said.

“It definitely
isn’t
with a guy,” Edward Marriner said firmly. “You and Kimberly can have Melanie’s room on the ground floor, if you don’t mind sharing?”

Aunt Kim smiled. “’Course not. It’ll make me feel young.”

“And maybe we’ll have her back tomorrow,” Ned’s father added.

Kimberly looked at him, seemed about to say something, but didn’t. Ned realized that she’d been doing that a lot.

“Let’s get your van,” she said.

SHE DROVE QUICKLY
and well. Traffic had thinned out. It didn’t take long to get there. Ned found that unsettling.

You were sitting where you could grab a Coke from the fridge and listen to U2 on your headphones, and then you were in a place where a bull had just been sacrificed and a man had drunk its blood and summoned a woman to life, between fires. No transition space between those things.

He’d thought about distance and speed and the modern world a couple of days ago, on the way to the mountain. He’d even had a notion to write a school essay about it, saying clever things.

The memory felt absurd now, another existence entirely. He looked at Kim in the glow of the dashboard lights. He wondered if that had been the feeling that had driven her from home after whatever had happened to her. Could you be drawn so far into this other kind of world that your own—the one you’d known all your life—felt alien and impossible?

“Just ahead on the right,” he said, as the headlights
picked out the brown sign for Entremont.

She saw it, and turned, a little too fast, the wheels skidding briefly.

“Sorry,” she said, downshifting as they climbed.

“That’s how
I
drive,” Greg said.