Wood Sprites (40 page)

There was a sleek black limo parked in the school-bus lane outside the school. It had rained sometime during the play, and the night gleamed wet and dangerous. A tall driver in a black suit got out as they approached and opened the back doors.

All the warnings to not get into cars with strangers played through Louise’s mind.

Louise glanced at the police officer and Principal Wiley watching, letting them be taken. They couldn’t see the wrongness of this. They knew nothing about Esme’s warnings.

She kept a firm hold on Nikola, who seemed to be stumbling through the same grief that she was feeling. There had been no chance to check to see if Joy was still asleep in Tesla’s storage bin or if the baby dragon had woken up and gone in search of food. “We’ll get in first.”

Louise pretended to struggle with getting Nikola into the limo, praying that Jillian was coherent enough to delay Anna. She cracked the top of the storage chamber, and Joy peered up at her, nearly vibrating with nervousness.

“Stay.” She used Tesla’s command, knowing that if she were overheard, the adults would assume she was talking to the nanny-bot. She fished a handful of jawbreakers out of her pocket and poured them in with Joy and hurriedly closed the lid.

The need for distraction, though, had broken what little control Jillian might have had. Wailing, she needed to be lifted into the car.

Louise knew that Esme’s family was crazy rich, but it was another thing to drive up to a mansion larger than their school and spill out of the limo into a foyer that was all polished marble, gleaming gold leaf, and sparkling crystal.

Their footsteps echoed through vast empty areas as they made their way through the house to a second-floor bedroom.

“This is Esme’s old room.” Anna moved through the large room, flicking on lights. It was a great cave of a room with a twenty-foot ceiling. At one time it had been decorated in the same tween princess-style as Elle’s bedroom. Apparently it was the set of furniture that rich people bought their little girls. In the Pondwaters’ case, it was an effort to mold their daughter into a demure princess. Whatever reason had moved Anna to purchase the furniture, it obviously had been a complete failure. Every piece had been attacked, defiled, and remodeled by someone who was as whimsical as she was angry.

The four-poster bed had been sprayed high-gloss lacquer black and fitted in what looked like a steampunk elevator cage so it could be raised up to a loft area. The other pieces had also been sprayed black and trimmed with silver, and random gears and cogs had been added. The mirrored vanity had been merged with obscure antique electronics so it looked like the control console of an ancient spacecraft. One wall was floor-to-ceiling bookcases with a tall library ladder on a brass rail. Another wall had faux windows installed and painted so they seemed like they were looking out over eighteenth-century Paris with airships drifting past a half-built Eiffel Tower. There was no sign of real windows, as if Esme had drywalled over them. An odd assortment of furniture crowded the room, from a half-disassembled pinball machine to model airships strung from the ceiling.

“You’ll have to share Esme’s bedroom tonight.” Anna opened a door and turned on another light, revealing a Jack and Jill bathroom that had been spared the steampunk makeover. “Lain’s bedroom is connected through here, but it’s empty. Lain moved all her things to Elfhome, but Esme just walked away from everything.”

“Everything” included old paper books and toys and gadgets crowding the bookcase shelves.

Anna threw a huge wall-mounted knife switch, and the bed lowered down to the ground. “We’ll get some furniture for the other room and—which one of you is the oldest?”

“We’re twins,” Louise said. “We’re the same age.”

“One of you was born first.” Anna started to strip the comforter and sheets from the bed. Dust scented the air as if no one had touched the bed for nearly twenty years.

Louise welcomed the flare of anger. “Mom and Dad said that there isn’t an ‘oldest’ and ‘youngest’ for us.” Since their father had fainted during the delivery, there had been a lot of confusion in the birthing room, and it was possible that their parents simply hadn’t known.

“We’ve always shared a bedroom,” Jillian whispered and clung to Louise as if Anna was about to force them apart.

Anna sighed, dropping the comforter and sheets onto the floor. “I suppose, for now, it won’t hurt for you to share a room.”

There was a knock on the door. It opened, and a tall, elegant woman swept into the room with fresh linens in her hands. She had that same hidden elf look that Ming had, as if everything that said “elf” had been carefully erased, and yet nothing could hide the tall, willowy build and the unearthly beauty.

“I’m sorry,” the non-elf said. “I only had time to dust and run a mop around the room. The vacuum cleaner threw another hissy fit. I wish we could find a good old-fashioned one without any sensors or filters or computers.”

“This is Celine.” Anna dipped a hand toward the female. “She’s been our housekeeper since she was very young.”

Louise eyed the female. If Tristan was nearly forty and looked ten, then how old was Celine? The housekeeper seemed unaware of the twins’ stares. She unfurled the bottom sheet and then expertly tucked the corners around the ends of the mattress.

Anna stripped the pillowcase from one of the pillows and gave it a tentative sniff. “These are too musty.” She gazed about the room. “I don’t know why I left everything this way. Esme’s not coming back. Even if she could, she wouldn’t. She hated this house.”

Celine took the pillows, carefully keeping whatever she thought of Esme off her face. “I have good goose down ones stored in plastic for guests. They’ll be good for tonight—unless the girls are allergic to down.”

Louise flinched under the women’s joint gaze. “No. At least, I don’t think so. Our father was allergic to them, so we never had them in the house.”

“George Mayer was allergic?” Anna asked to clarify whom Louise meant by “father.”

“Yes, our father!” Louise snapped.

Anna pursed her lips against whatever she wanted to say in reply. “Are you allergic to anything? Are there any medicines you should be taking?”

“No. No,” Louise said.

Celine gathered up the dusty bedding. “I’ll get the pillows and a blanket.”

“I can’t sleep without Fritz,” Jillian mumbled, leaning against Louise.

Louise whimpered in dismay. Jillian had never slept without her security blanket. Even when they stayed over at their Aunt Kitty’s, they took it with them. If they forgot it, Jillian
couldn’t
get to sleep. “Fritz is her blanket. Our Grandma Mayer made him for her. He’s at our house. Can—can we go get him?”

“I’ll have someone go get it. What does it look like? Where does she normally keep it?”

Louise stared at her for a minute in confusion. Surely Anna didn’t mean that a stranger would walk into their house and go through their things. And then in a wave of horror Louise realized that soon strangers were going to go through all their stuff. “Can’t we just go ourselves?”

“No, you’re both too upset. Just tell me where it is.”

Jillian pressed against Louise and whispered, “I want Fritz.”

“On her bed.” Louise fought not to cry as she gave up. “It’s inside the blue flannel pillowcase.”

“I’ll send a driver to go get it.”

* * *

Within an hour, Fritz had been fetched from their house. In the meantime, the twins had been fed a dinner of hot oatmeal and given a hot bath. They were dressed in long white nightgowns, obviously brand-new and still warm from the dryer.

Every moment of Anna or Celine fussing at them was like sandpaper against Louise’s nerves. Finally she could take no more. She pushed Anna toward the door, crying, “We just want to be alone!”

Louise got Jillian into the bed with Nikola and fiddled with the controls she found in the headboard to close the elevator doors and raise the bed up to the loft. In the small fortress, she undid the storage lid and let Joy out.

The baby dragon whimpered in distress and cuddled against Louise’s chin.

“We’re all together,” Louise whispered the only comfort that they had. “We have each other.”

She found the light switch and turned off the lights. In the darkness, familiar stars spread across the ceiling. Strangely, some forty years earlier, Esme had painted her ceiling with glow-in-the-dark paint, a low-tech equivalent of their holographic star field.

Between the familiar constellations were words visible only to someone who knew which dots were out of place.

“Don’t give up hope.”

* * *

Louise had felt weirdly hollow, like she’d been filled nearly to bursting with burning grief and then slowly drained. The residue of unbearable pain coated her, but every thought and action now dropped into a vast, echoing pit. Jillian could not stop crying. Joy sat on the pillows and stroked Jillian’s hair. Jillian wept even in her sleep.

Nikola lay beside Louise. “What is happening? Why are we here? Why didn’t we go home?”

“Something happened to Mom and Dad.” Louise felt the words tumble through her, burning as they struck sides, to vanish into the emptiness. The darkness swallowed everything up, leaving nothing but the remembrance of pain.

“What does that mean?”

“It means they’re gone away and they’re never coming back.” Louise had been little when Grandma Johnson and Grandma Mayer had died, but it set a pattern. Each time there had been a tiny funeral, sparsely attended by Aunt Kitty and old people that Louise didn’t know. They would clean out the house, taking first the treasures. The old photographs. The family Bible. The beloved Christmas ornaments. Then there would be the mountain of unwanted things to be given away to Goodwill.

After that—nothing. No calls. No visits. No cards in the mail. A painful emptiness that at first was constantly tripped over but slowly healed to nothing.

As much as Louise wanted to go home, she dreaded it. It would be another step along the familiar road. The house would be too still. Too silent. They would gather up what they wanted, constrained by common sense, and be forced to throw out everything else. Their mother’s beloved shoes. Their father’s wine cork collection. The everyday dishes.

The house would be emptied, and then it would be gone and there would be nothing left at all of their parents.

The grief came flooding back, surging up through her throat, hot and burning, to spill out as fiery tears.

Nikola gave a raw whimper of pain. “Why do we feel so bad? What’s wrong with us? Are we going to die?”

She scrubbed away her tears and hugged him tight. “No, no, you’re just sad. You’re okay. It will go away.”

“This is sad? Sad is horrible.”

“Yes, it is.”

“How do you stop being sad?”

“You think of something happy.”

“Like being real and able to hug back? And being able to smell flowers? And eat cake?”

Louise hugged him tighter. “Yes, think of being real.”

* * *

She tried to sleep. She knew that she did a little, in that she became aware that she had been dreaming, and thus must have been asleep. Alexander haunted her dreams, pursued by monsters. At four in the morning, she gave up and cautiously lowered the bed.

“What are you doing?” Nikola whispered as she stripped off the long white nightgown and dressed in her stage ninja clothes.

“Joy is going to wake up hungry. I’m going to find her something to eat.” She pulled the pillowcase off her pillow.

“Okay.” Nikola padded to the door and waited expectantly for her. Much as Louise didn’t want to creep around the big scary house alone, she knew that there was less of a chance of her getting caught if she didn’t take Nikola. He just wasn’t built with sneaking in mind.

“Stay here,” she said.

“We want to come with you.”

“You need to stay here and keep Jillian and Joy safe.”

“Joy never listens to us. She says we’re just a dumb babies.”

“You’re not dumb.” Louise responded to the part she could positively address. “There are things about the world that you know a lot more about than she does. Like the Internet and robotics.”