The Thread That Binds the Bones (29 page)

“You always knew where I was?” said Laura.

“Yes. First Seattle. Four years—college. Then San Francisco. Then L.A. for a little while, then Portland.”

She laughed. “You were the person I was hiding from.”

“I knew that. That’s why I found you, at first. But then, I don’t know, you were in school, Outside. I kept thinking of long distance things to do to you, but they stopped being funny. You were just too—too normal or something. It didn’t seem fair.”

“What you did to me at home was never fair either.”

“Yeah, but everybody seemed to
expect
me to—I don’t know—” He bogged down and looked at Maggie, who had taken her seat beside Laura again and was sipping coffee. “I thought there was something wrong with you.”

She waggled her eyebrows at him.

Alyssa tapped his shoulder. “Don’t change the subject, Michael. Are you saying you used to persecute Laura as well as all the others?”

“I guess you could call it that,” he said.

“Why?”

“I had power, and she was wingless.”

Alyssa said to Laura, “He calls you his favorite sister and says he loves you and that you’re coming to our wedding if he has to go get you himself. I don’t understand your branch of the Family, Laura.”

“Who is the teacher?”

Everyone turned to Tom, who had retrieved his oatmeal and taken Carroll’s seat, and he realized the voice that had just spoken was Peregrine’s.

Trixie, subdued, came back from seeing Carroll off
.
She sat down beside Bert.

“What do you mean, Ancient?” Laura asked.

—Tommy? May I pursue this?

—Sure.

“Who’s teaching you the disciplines these days?” Peregrine asked.

“Great-aunt Fayella,” said Michael.

“Small and venomous,” muttered Peregrine. “Jaimie mentioned her. We should have paid more attention.”

“What do you mean? What’s going on, anyway?” Michael asked. “Why are you calling your husband ancient, Laura?”

“The Presence who possessed him after purification—it stayed inside him. Sometimes it talks. Ancient, what does the teacher have to do with this?”

“It is the teacher’s job to balance the scales, to subdue the strong and protect the weak, to instruct each into a sense of his own worth. When Jaimie spoke of her schooling, she said the dark disciplines were encouraged, but all the others were slighted. Only, you learned them all, niece?” He looked at Laura.

She shrugged. “Book learning, anyway. She rushed through a lot of subjects, but I took good notes and studied them. I spent a lot of time in the library, too. She really rewarded the masters of the dark though. When Michael transformed something—me, half the time—she gave him
tishina.
Same with Gwen and Sarah and Marie and Piron; and who knows about the younger ones. And she rewarded deadwalk, and illspeak, and fetchcasting, and beguilements; she liked ill-eye and all the tangles, and she rewarded us when we practiced these things on each other.”

“Was she Carroll’s teacher too?” Peregrine asked.

“Oh, yes,” said Laura. “She’s been ... teaching since ...” Her eyes widened. “Since the late fifties.” She looked at Peregrine, then across at Bert, whose eyes narrowed.

“There are Fayella stories,” said Trixie slowly. She frowned, her brows pinching together. “Hard to remember. The Nightwalker.”

“Oh,” said Bert, touching his temples with the first and second fingers of both hands. “Say more.”

“Charlie Campbell,” Trixie said, and touched her throat.

“Oh, God,” said Bert.

“Charlie Campbell,” Trixie whispered, rubbing her throat in little circles. “That was in the days when the whole upper and lower school was just a couple of rooms—no portables. Charlie was in the seventh grade when I was in third, just before the Second World War. The trains used to stop in town then and we had strangers around; things hadn’t boiled down into the kind of isolation we have now. Nor we weren’t so frightened then, at least not of people from the Hollow, not until the time Miss Fayella took Charlie, the handsomest boy in the whole school. And she—” Trixie paused. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I forgot this. I forgot it.” She looked up. “She was a right handsome young woman in those days, but even so, she robbed the cradle. She took him away ...”

“And she sent him back,” said Bert. His face wore no expression, but his eyes were hot.

Trbrie nodded. “She sent him back some months later. I must have been about eight. I saw Charlie walking the streets in the twilight. I was just a little kid then, running around with the boys. We were always running along the backs of buildings ’cause you never knew what somebody might throw out. Bert, you were just a baby. Must have been about four. How can you remember any of this?”

“I was always interested in everything.”

“I saw Charlie walking the streets in the twilight. I ran up to him. I thought he must have gotten away from Miss Fayella somehow. But he was dead. Parts of him were gone. Oh, God.”

“They put a curfew,” said Bert, “and the Everything Store got in blackout curtains; everybody in town bought ’em. Nobody went out after dark if they could help it. But it got so bad Lem Hickory went out to the Hollow and talked to Mr. Jacob about it. Mr. Jacob put a stop to it. Said they hadn’t even known she was doing that. Miss Scylla went to the Campbells’s holdings with apologies and charms and the rites of grief and comfort, and no one saw Miss Fayella in town anymore.”

“So she stayed home and trained up the young ones?” said Trixie. “How could they make a decision like that?”

“When was the war?” Peregrine asked.

Everyone looked at him.

“I have been dead a long time,” he said in the face of their shock.

“It started, for our country, in 1941,” Bert said.

“And she did not begin to teach until the late nineteen-fifties, Laura?”

“That’s what Jess told me.”

“So she was sequestered for a period,” Peregrine muttered. “Someone must have tried to give her a deep cleansing. I hope. But it has not worked. She has put everything out of balance. This must stop.”

“No wonder Carroll is so mixed up,” said Trixie.

“Ancient,” said Laura, “is that why Michael had so much trouble during Purification? Would Carroll fail?”

“During Purification, deeper presences than I manifest, and their tests measure qualities I cannot sense. You are right, though; character weighs in the balance, and past actions. Your training, and how you have incorporated it. I do not know if Carroll would succeed. There is a solid core in him—but I don’t know if he knows it.” He felt pain in his left hand, and shook it, then noticed that the wedding ring was glowing again.

“Oh,” said Tom. “Eddie. It must be. The rest of us are here. I’ve got to go.”

“What?” Michael asked. “Not now. I’m just finding out—”

“That can wait, and this won’t,” said Laura. “Michael, you be nice while we’re gone.” She jumped up and went to Tom, putting her arms around him. He dropped his arm around her shoulders and spun a strand to pull them both to Eddie.

Chapter 19

Gas fumes almost overcame them when Tom got them fixed and focused into the reality of Pops’s garage. Eddie was spraying gas everywhere, yelling, “No! No! No!” as he did it. Pops lay on the ground, gas-spattered, his glasses smashed beside his head, his eyes shut. Tom saw his chest rise and fall.

A green-clad woman, young and very beautiful, stood on top of the regular gas pump. “Yes, yes,” she said, jabbing her index finger toward Eddie like a radio controller aiming an antenna at a model airplane. “Get it all ready. We’ll have a friendly little fire.”

Tom slipped out of Laura’s arms and ran to Eddie. Sticky tar-black strands webbed around Eddie, but Tom’s foxfire touch dissolved them. Eddie flung the gas nozzle away. He screamed and ran for the regular pump, grabbing the woman’s ankles and jerking her down so suddenly she had no time to react. Her head hit the pump, and she barely managed to break her fall with her arms. “You bitch!” Eddie yelled, kicking her in the ribs.

“Stop it!” Tom caught his shoulders and dragged him away. The woman pushed herself upright. She spat at them. A shape like a translucent black bat flew from her mouth, landed on Eddie’s neck, and tried to creep into his shirt. It refused to dissolve when Tom touched it with foxfire. Instead, his fingers burned. He could see the bat eating at Eddie’s skin with its under-surface.

—Peregrine! What is it! How do we fight it?

—A power of water. Spit blue at it.

—What?

Eddie jerked and twisted in his grasp, gagging and choking.

—Spit blue!

Tom hawked and tried to imagine himself spitting a color. He saw a shape like a blue hand leave his mouth and smother the bat. The black and blue fluttered against each other, then dropped off Eddie’s neck and fell battling to the ground.

Eddie curled over, coughing. Tom glanced at the woman, saw her open her mouth again. He spat first. He saw a red hand emerge from his mouth; it flew to her face and gagged her, making her swallow what she was preparing to spit. She started coughing with her mouth closed, her face going red. While she was incapacitated, he cast a tight-woven silver net around her, thickening it until he couldn’t even see her. “Helpless but healthy, helpless but healthy,” he whispered to his net, then wondered if that was too generic a command; it was a condition, not a shape. He looked around for Laura, saw her carrying Pops inside the station, with his glasses floating after her.

“Eddie?” He knelt beside Eddie.

Choking and red-faced, Eddie tried to straighten. His throat was red and peeling, as if eaten by acid.

“What did she do!”—Peregrine, can we heal?

—Try. Summon and harness energy; touch the afflicted area; concentrate on the golden reweaving. Pour it there; it asks and aids the body to make repairs whatever way is best.

Tom remembered the golden glow he had seen Laura summon when she healed Maggie. Carroll had used it too. Tom touched Eddie’s throat and called. Presently light answered his call, flowing around Eddie’s neck and sinking into his skin. The ravaged tissues restored themselves under the glow’s influence. Eddie touched his throat, managed to stand up. After a minute he looked at Tom. “God, that was awful. Thanks for coming.” Then his eyes widened. He looked around. “Pops! Where’s Pops? She was gonna make me burn up the station and Pops too! What happened to Pops? She made me knock him over and pour gas on him. If I hurt him, I’ll kill myself.”

“Laura took him inside,” Tom said. “If anything’s wrong with him, she’ll fix it.”

“How can you trust one of those murdering bitches!” Eddie ran into the shop with Tom trailing him. “You get away from him, you evil witch!”

Startled, Laura looked up. Pops lay on the couch in the room where people waited for their cars to get fixed. Laura held his head in her hands. Eddie ran toward her, arms outstretched, his hands aimed at her throat.

“Stop!” Tom yelled, and Eddie froze. “Don’t ever talk to Laura like that, and don’t you hurt her.”

Eddie shivered. He opened and closed his mouth. “You’re doing it too,” he said at last. “Just like them. Pulling my strings.”

“I warned you.”

Pops’s eyes flickered open. Laura let go of his head and smiled down at him. Pops smiled back. “Miss Laura! So nice to see you,” he said.

“Thank you.” She picked up his glasses from the table and held them. Tom saw a flash of silver around her cupped hands. “This might make it easier,” she said, offering the glasses, restored, to Pops. He put them on with trembling hands. He reached up and patted her cheek.

Tom relaxed the strands of the net he had spun around Eddie. Eddie glared at him, then went to Pops. “You okay? Oh, Pops. I’m so sorry.”

“I feel fine now,” said Pops. He sat up. “I feel good!” He tapped his chest. “Miss Laura, what did you do? I don’t have pain here anymore.”

Laura looked at Tom, then at her hands. “Gates opening again?” she asked. “Are you doing it, or am I?”

“You are.”

Eddie said, “Sony. Sorry I yelled at you.”

She gave him a smile. To Tom, she looked like the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He blinked and saw her features glowing golden, remembered her talking about addressing her spark, and figured she was doing it now, whether she knew it or not. “You were upset,” she said to Eddie. “And you don’t know me. It’s okay.”

Carroll strolled into the station carrying two sacks of groceries. “What is that thing outside?” he asked.

Eddie jumped up, putting himself between Pops and Carroll. Carroll made a half-smile.

“What? What thing?” Tom felt a shiver of apprehension. He ran past Carroll outside. Something lay at the base of one of the gas pumps. At first Tom saw only his silver net. Then he looked without Othersight and saw what appeared to be a person-sized pink potato. “Oh, God. Is she dead?”

It quivered.

Tom glanced back over his shoulder at Carroll. “You take Laura home if she wants you to?”

“All right.”

“Help her clean up the mess here?”

Carroll grinned. The green in his eyes silvered. A dimple flashed in his cheek. Tom had never noticed it before. “All right,” he said.

“Thanks. I’ll be back.” Tom spun a strand out to the clearing where he and Carroll-as-raven had had their talk. He pulled himself and the pink blob there.

He sat down, hugging himself, facing the thing he had turned the woman into. Another rash choice, but he had had to think fast. She was Family; she had
sitva;
she was still alive. Was she still herself? He tuned in to his net. “You may speak,” he said, hoping she would have something to say.

“Who are you? What did you do to me? Stop it right now, or my whole Family will be after you, and once that happens you’re worse than dead.”

He felt relieved. “Who are
you
?
Are you Gwen?” His voice dropped as Peregrine took over. “Do you think the Family would sanction your harming anyone in town? You mistake, young woman! What is rule one in
tanganar
relationships?”

—What
is
rule one? Tom wondered.

“Never hurt them where they live,” Gwen said.