Ysabel (39 page)

“I felt older, and . . . darker. Stronger. Not dark as in bad. Dark as in . . .” She trailed off, looked for help.

“Desire?” Aunt Kim said softly.

Kate nodded, staring down at the table.

Ned saw Kim exchange a glance with her husband. “I do know a little about that. It was Beltaine. You were connecting through Phelan. And maybe Ned.”

“Why me?” Ned asked.

His aunt smiled gently. “That’s the hard question in this, you know. Our family line, back a long way. We’re
in
this.” She looked at her sister. “That’s what happened to me, Meg.”

“But I was never like this before,” Ned protested.

“Everything starts somewhere, dear.”

“You never shaved before this year either, right?” Uncle Dave said helpfully.

His wife stared at him, her eyes wide. “My goodness. Thank you so much for the clarification, dear. That,” she added, “is an amazingly silly analogy.”

Uncle Dave looked abashed. “I, uh, have shaving on my mind, I guess.”

There was a brief silence. No one laughed.

“You’re walking up to Entremont,” Meghan Marriner said, looking at her notes. “Kate’s feeling strange. Go on.”

“Forgot to say, Phelan had told me to keep away that night. He’d overheard Kate and me planning the outing in the café, told me not to go, just before he left, and then we fought the dogs.”

“He tried to warn you?” Ned’s father looked thoughtful, but not as if the thinking was getting him anywhere.

“Why
did
you go up?” Steve asked. Fair question. Melanie was gone because they’d done it.

“I made him,” Kate said glumly. “Called him a wimp and stuff.”

“Oh, well, that’ll do it,” Greg said. “Really, I dig it, you had no choice. When a girl says that . . .”

A couple of smiles around the table this time.

Ned said, “It wasn’t far. It was just after five, maybe a quarter after. The place closed at six-thirty. Way before dark. He’d told me not to be there for Beltaine, and I figured it started at night.”

“It does,” Kate said. “But it got dark too soon.”

They shared the story, tripping over each other a little. The moon, the fires, the bull. Cadell and the druid and the spirits that came. Phelan appearing beside them. Ned phoning the villa.

Melanie. Ysabel.

Around the table there was silence as they spoke and when they were done.

“I just
had
to fall asleep back here,” Greg said bitterly, first to break the stillness.

Kate looked at him. “I’d be gone,” she said. “I’d be Ysabel now, if you had come.”

She began to cry.

Meghan pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and passed it down. She looked at Ned, and nodded calmly. He carried on alone, to Cadell and Brys in the laneway with the boar. He kept the one thing back: what he’d done to Cadell’s horns. He told of Brys attacking Greg.

“My first Purple Heart,” Greg said. “My mom will be proud.”

“After that,” Ned said, looking at his own mother, “Dad and the others came and got us, and then we talked to you.”

“And I called Dave,” said Aunt Kim.

Kate had stopped crying. She was still holding the handkerchief.

“And Dave was minding me in Darfur. We
are
going to have to talk about that,” Meghan Marriner said, looking at her brother-in-law.

“I know,” said Uncle Dave. “Will I get a blindfold and last cigarette?”

“Doubt it,” Meghan said. “Ned, you’re up to this morning? While I was flying here?”

He finished, taking her through Glanum and the cemetery. His father joined in there, and then Uncle Dave.

As they were wrapping up, laying the druid in his coffin, the telephone rang.

It seemed an alien, intrusive thing. No one moved for a moment. Ned’s father finally got up to answer it at the desk.

“Oliver!” he said, forcing cheerfulness. “How nice to hear from you. No, no, no, we ate early. North Americans, what can I tell you? What’s up?”

Everyone around the table was looking at him in silence. Edward Marriner said very little for a time. “Really?” once, and then, “That
is
extraordinary.”

And then, “No, no, of course it is interesting. Thanks for calling. I’ll be sure to tell the others.” And finally, “Yes, we might indeed think of a photograph.”

He hung up. Looked at all of them.

“It was just on local radio. Someone on a motorcycle dropped a heavy bag an hour ago in front of a café on the Cours Mirabeau in Aix, and tore off.”

“A bomb?” Steve asked.

Edward Marriner shook his head. “They thought so, obviously. Cleared the street. But when the police and dogs came, it turned out not to be.” He looked at Ned. “It was the sculpted head and skull stolen from the museum.”

Motorcycle. Ned looked at Kate. He couldn’t begin to think of what to say.

“These are the two things Ned saw? Under the cathedral?” his mother asked.

“They have to be,” her husband said.

Meghan sighed. “Fine. I’ve got a note, for what it’s worth.” She looked at Ned, and then at Kimberly. “Is that it? That takes us to this evening?”

“More or less,” Ned said. “I mean, I’m sure I’ll remember other things, but . . .”

His mother nodded. “But this is the story. Fine. A couple of questions?”

“I knew there’d be an exam,” he said, trying to smile.

“I’m the one writing it,” his mother said. “Or it feels that way.” She looked at her notes. “Wolves, twice, by that tower and in the cemetery, but dogs in the city?”

Ned blinked. What did that have to do with anything? He nodded. “Yeah, that’s right.”

Meghan turned to her sister. “I’m playing along here, you understand? Don’t imagine I am buying everything.” She waited for Kim to nod, then said, “Do these . . . spirits
change
themselves into animals or take over real animals here?”

Kim thought about it. “I don’t know. I think they were dogs in Aix because there are always dogs there, and wolves would obviously cause an alarm.”

“Yes, I thought that. But you don’t know which they do, change or . . . occupy?”

Kim shook her head.

Her sister was still looking at her. “Ysabel takes over someone, right? Someone real? Melanie, this time, it would have been Kate. Different women each time, before?”

Kim nodded slowly. “I see where you’re going.”

“Good.”

Meghan removed her glasses and turned to Greg.

“Whatever else happens, young man, we are going to the hospital first thing in the morning, you and I. Rabies will kill you. The treatment’s easy now, but it
must
start quickly. I’m not going to be argued with on this. Some things we may not be able to do anything about, but simple medicine and common sense we can use. If these Celtic spirits entered an existing wild creature we have
no
idea what its condition was before.”

Greg opened his mouth. Meghan held up a finger.

“Gregory, hush. We will say you met an uncollared dog outside the locked cemetery gates. You like dogs, you knelt to pat it, it clawed you and ran away. End of story, end of questions. I show my Médecins Sans Frontières ID, I sign all their forms, and they give me the dosages to follow up. They like MSF here, they
founded
it. One immunoglobulin shot tomorrow morning and one vaccine, five over the next month.
Not even
remotely
complicated. Guaranteed prevention. Are we done discussing this?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Greg said meekly. Ned would have said the same thing. He felt an overwhelming sense of relief that his mom was here, and not just because she wasn’t where she’d been yesterday.

Meghan Marriner made a precise tick mark on her first page of notes. She put her glasses on again and studied the page a moment, then looked up at her sister again.

“Same point. If Ysabel has become Melanie, or the other way round, what do we know from that? Is Melanie
there
in any way?”

Kim pursed her lips. “I think so.” She looked at her husband. “I think Ned had it right, before . . . the men return as themselves, but she’s
summoned
into someone, and she’s a little different each time.”

Meghan nodded, “So if she’s different it’s—”

“—Melanie that’s the difference,” Kate Wenger finished. “That makes sense.”

Meghan Marriner smiled a little. “I try.”

“But what do we know if we know that?” Steve asked.

Meghan took off her glasses again. “Well, for starters, imagine she wanted to steer this, to tell us something. What does Melanie know about Provence, about Aix, this whole area?”

Ned’s brief excitement faded. He looked glumly at Greg and Steve, and then his dad.

Edward Marriner sighed. “Just about everything, honey. She spent half a year getting ready for this.”

“She’s worse than Kate, Mom. She’s worse than
you
,” Ned said.

“Well, really,” said his father, half-heartedly, “I wouldn’t go
that
far.”

Meghan raised an eyebrow at her son and then looked at her husband. “Careful, both of you. You are both in potential trouble tonight.”

“Why me? I didn’t compare the supernatural realm to an adolescent shaving,” Edward Marriner protested.

“I still think that was a good metaphor!” Uncle Dave complained promptly.

“That,” said Kimberly, “just makes the point for us. Better to keep quiet. Nobody needs to
know
you still think that way.”

“The management is taking the entire question of male idiocy under advisement,” Kate Wenger said.

Meghan grinned encouragement at her. “You said it, girl.”

Ned carefully avoided looking at Kate. He knew exactly what she was doing with that phrase. He’d either redden or laugh if he caught her eye, and neither would be useful just now.

He cleared his throat. “I hate to accuse my own mother of being frivolous, but is this really the best time to get into sisterhood bonding?”

“It isn’t such a bad time,” Aunt Kim murmured.

She was looking at Meghan. Ned blinked. Moods could change pretty fast, he thought.

Meghan shook her head, “Don’t rush me, Kim.” She paused, looked back down at her notes. “So you guys
are saying we can’t predict anything from Melanie being part of this?”

“Maybe we can,” Kim said. “It’s a good thought, Meg. I just don’t know what, yet.”

Steve lifted his hand. They seemed to be copying Kate’s good-student gesture here. “You know, I’d bet a lot the reason there’s a search and not a fight is Melanie.”

“That makes sense too,” Kate said. “They were really surprised by it. They didn’t like it at all.”

“Why?”

“They want to kill each other,” Ned said.

Meghan hesitated, then made another tick mark.

HIS MOTHER HAD
other notes, and other questions. None of them triggered anything close to a revelation.

She asked why Phelan had been going under the baptistry in the first place. What he’d been looking for down there. Ned didn’t know, neither did Aunt Kim.

“If I was guessing . . .” Ned began.

“Might as well, honey,” his mother said. “No marks deducted.”

“He said something about finding him—the other guy—in time. And never being able to do it.”
The world will end,
he’d actually said. “Maybe he wanted to kill Cadell before the summoning.”

“But then she’d never appear,” his father said, “if I understand this at all.”

“I know,” Ned said. “That’s why I’m just guessing. I think . . . I think he’s really tired.”

There was a short silence.

“‘Who could have foretold that the heart grows old,’” Aunt Kim said. Then added, “That’s Yeats, not me.”

The air I breathe is her, or wanting her.
That didn’t sound like a worn-out heart.

“I think it’s really complicated,” Ned said.

“Uh-huh, I’ll buy that,” said Greg.

Ned’s mother made a dash this time on her sheet, not a tick mark. She asked about when the sculpture underground had been stolen, and when it might have been made. The theft, they knew, was recent. The work, they had no idea. A tick mark, a dash.

Meghan wanted to know what had happened at Béziers.
God will know his own
. Kate answered that one. Good student. Another tick. More questions, varying marks on paper, the moon rising outside. Ned felt a sudden rush of love for his mother. Against the weight of centuries—against druids and skulls and wolves, rituals of blood, fire, and men who could grow horns from their heads like a forest god, or fly—she was trying to bring order and clarity to bear.

He saw her put down her pen, take off her glasses and fold them. She rubbed her eyes. This would have been, he thought, a long, amazingly hard day for her.

Kate excused herself to call Marie-Chantal’s house and report she was spending another night away. Ned had the feeling they didn’t worry a whole lot about their guest there, but he didn’t ask questions. He was glad she was staying. There were—by now—a variety of reasons.

In the absence of anything close to a better idea, they decided to stay with today’s plan: do the same searching tomorrow. Kate had been right—they arranged three groups.

“I want to go back to Aix,” Ned said suddenly.

He hadn’t planned to say that, but it was interesting how everyone simply accepted it, deferring to him. Even his mother. That went beyond “interesting” and reached “surreal,” actually.

Veracook had gone home. Greg went into the kitchen to make another pot of tea. Kate and Kim and Uncle Dave stayed at the table, bent over a big map, sorting out routes. Ned’s parents put on sweaters and went out on the terrace together. He could see them through the glass doors, their chairs close. His mom touched his father on the shoulder once, as Ned watched.

Steve had put on the television, a soccer game. Ned went and joined him on the couch. Eventually Greg brought his tea and sat with them. On the screen one team got a corner kick and someone headed the ball into the net. The player became very excited, so did the announcers and the crowd.

When it was time for sleep things got interesting in another way, since they were now short a bed. Ned had the two singles in his room, but he somehow didn’t think Kate would switch up there.

Good call on that one. Uncle Dave came upstairs with Ned, Kate stayed in the main-floor bedroom with Aunt Kim.