Текст книги "Written in My Own Heart's Blood"

Автор книги: Diana Gabaldon

Соавторы: Diana Gabaldon
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Текущая страница: 51 (всего у книги 74 страниц)

“Huh,” she said, and sipped, flipping back over the pages she’d written. “What a hodgepodge.” This wouldn’t do anyone much good: nothing but disconnected thoughts and things that didn’t even qualify as decent speculation.

Still, her mind wouldn’t let go of the matter. Electromagnetism … Bodies had electric fields of their own, she knew that much. Was that maybe why you didn’t just disintegrate when you traveled? Did your own field keep you together, just long enough to pop out again? She supposed that might explain the gemstone thing: you could travel on the strength of your own field, if you were lucky, but the energy released from the molecular bonds in a crystal might well add to that field, so perhaps … ?

“Bugger,” she said, her overworked mental processes creaking to a halt. She glanced guiltily at the hallway that led to the kids’ room. They both knew that word, but they oughtn’t to think their mother did.

She sank back to finish the wine and let her mind roam free, soothed by the sound of the distant surf. Her mind wasn’t interested in water, though; it seemed still concerned with electricity.

“I sing the Body Electric,” she said softly. “The armies of those I love engirth me.”

Now, there was a thought. Maybe Walt Whitman had been onto something … because if the electric attraction of the armies of those I love had an effect on time-traveling, it would explain the apparent effect of fixing your attention on a specific person, wouldn’t it?

She thought of standing in the stones of Craigh na Dun, thinking of Roger. Or of standing on Ocracoke, mind fixed fiercely on her parents—she’d read all the letters now; she knew exactly where they were… . Would that make a difference? An instant’s panic, as she tried to visualize her father’s face, more as she groped for Roger’s …

The expression of the face balks account. The next line echoed soothingly in her head. But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face;

It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists;

It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees—dress does not hide him;

The strong, sweet supple quality he has, strikes through the cotton and flannel;

To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more;

You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

She didn’t remember any more, but didn’t need to; her mind had calmed.

“I’d know you anywhere,” she said softly to her husband, and lifted the remains of her glass. “Slàinte.”



NAY GREAT SHORTAGE OF HAIR IN SCOTLAND

MR. CUMBERPATCH proved to be a tall, ascetic person with an incongruous crop of red curls that sat on his head like a small, inquisitive animal. He had, he said, taken the disks in trade for a sucking pig, along with a tin pan whose bottom had been burnt through but could easy be patched, six horseshoes, a looking glass, and half a dresser.

“Not really a tinker by trade, see?” he said. “Don’t travel much. But things come and find me, they do.”

Evidently they did. Mr. Cumberpatch’s tiny cottage was crammed to its rafters with items that had once been useful and might be so again, once Mr. Cumberpatch got round to fixing them.

“Sell much?” Buck asked, raising an eyebrow at a disassembled carriage clock that sat on the hearth, its internal organs neatly piled into a worn silver comfit dish.

“Happen,” Mr. Cumberpatch said laconically. “See anything ye like?”

In the interests of cooperation, Roger haggled politely for a dented canteen and a canvas bed sack with only a few small charred holes at one end, these the result of some soldier taking his rest too close to a campfire. And received in turn the name and general direction of the person from whom Mr. Cumberpatch had got the disks.

“Flimsy sort of jewel,” his host said, with a shrug. “And t’old woman said she wouldn’t have it in t’house, all those numbers might be to do with magic, aye? Her not holdin’ with sorcery and t’like.”

The old woman in question was possibly twenty-five, Roger thought, a tiny, dark-eyed creature like a vole, who—summoned to provide tea—sized them up with a shrewd glance and proceeded to sell them a small, flabby-looking cheese, four turnips, and a large raisin tart, at an extortionate price. But the price included her own observations on her husband’s transaction—well worth it, so far as Roger was concerned.

“That ornament—strange thing, no?” she said, narrowing her eyes at the pocket where Roger had replaced it. “Man what sold it to Anthony said he’d had it from a hairy man, one of them as lives on the wall.”

“Which wall would this be, missus?” Buck asked, draining his cup and holding it out for more. She gave him a look from her bead-bright eyes, obviously thinking him a simpleton, but they were paying customers, after all… .

“Why, the Roman one, to be sure,” she said. “They say the old king o’ the Romes put it up, so as to keep the Scots from coming into England.” The thought made her grin, small teeth gleaming. “As though anybody’d want to be a-going there in t’first place!”

Further questions elicited nothing more; Mrs. Cumberpatch had no idea what was meant by “a hairy man”; that was what the man said, and she hadn’t wondered about it. Declining an offer from Mr. Cumberpatch for his knife, Roger and Buck took their leave, the food wrapped in the bed sack. But as they did so, Roger saw a pottery dish containing a tangle of chains and tarnished bracelets, and a stray gleam of rainy light struck a tiny red glow.

It must have been Cumberpatch’s description of the disks as a jewel—a common way to refer to a pendant ornament—that had made his mind sensitive. He stopped and, stirring the dish with a forefinger, drew out a small pendant, blackened, cracked, and with a broken chain—it looked as though it had been in a fire—but set with a fairly large garnet, caked with grime but faceted.

“How much for this?” he said.



IT WAS DARK by four o’clock, and long cold nights to be sleeping out of doors, but Roger’s sense of urgency drove them on, and they found themselves benighted on a lonely road, with nothing but a wind-gnarled Caledonian pine for shelter. Starting a fire with tinder and damp pine needles was no joke, but after all, Roger reflected, grimly bashing steel and flint for the hundredth time—and his finger for the twentieth—they had nothing but time.

Buck had, with a forethought born of painful experience, brought a sack of peats, and after a quarter hour of frantic blowing on sparks and thrusting grass-stems and pine needles into the infant flame, they succeeded in getting two of these miserable objects to burn with sufficient heat as to roast—or at least sear—the turnips and warm their fingers, if not the rest of them.

There hadn’t been any conversation since they’d left the Cumberpatch establishment: impossible to talk with the cold wind whistling past their ears as they rode, and no breath with which to do it during the struggle with fire and food.

“What’ll you do if we find him?” Buck asked suddenly, mid-turnip. “If J. W. MacKenzie really is your father, I mean.”

“I’ve speg”—Roger’s throat was clogged from the cold and he coughed and spat, resuming hoarsely—“spent the last three days wondering that, and the answer is, I don’t know.”

Buck grunted and unwrapped the raisin tart from the bed sack, divided it carefully, and handed Roger half.

It wasn’t bad, though Mrs. Cumberpatch couldn’t be said to have a light hand with pastry.

“Filling,” Roger remarked, thriftily dabbing crumbs off his coat and eating them. “D’ye not want to go, then?”

Buck shook his head. “Nay, I canna think of anything better to do. As ye say—it’s the only clue there is, even if it doesna seem to have aught to do with the wee lad.”

“Mmphm. And there’s the one good thing—we can head straight south to the wall; we needn’t waste time looking for the man Cumberpatch got the disks from.”

“Aye,” Buck said dubiously. “And then what? Walk the length of it, askin’ after a hairy man? How many o’ those do ye think there might be? Nay great shortage of hair in Scotland, I mean.”

“If we have to,” Roger said shortly. “But if J. W. MacKenzie—and not just his identity disks—was anywhere in the neighborhood, I’m thinking he would have caused a good bit of talk.”

“Mmphm. And how long’s this wall, d’ye know?”

“I do, yes. Or, rather,” Roger corrected, “I know how long it was when it was built: eighty Roman miles. A Roman mile being just slightly shorter than an English one. No idea how much of it’s still there now, though. Most of it, likely.”

Buck grimaced. “Well, say we can walk fifteen, twenty miles in a day—the walkin’ will be easy, if it’s along a bloody wall—that’s only four days to cover the lot. Though …” A thought struck him and he frowned, pushing his damp forelock back. “That’s if we could walk from end to end. If we hit it midway, though, what then? We might cover half and find nothing, and then have to go all the way back to where we started.” He looked accusingly at Roger.

Roger rubbed a hand over his face. It was coming on to rain, and the mizzle was misting on his skin.

“I’ll think about it tomorrow, aye?” he said. “We’ll have plenty of time to make plans on our way.” He reached for the canvas bed sack, shook out a limp turnip frond and ate it, then pulled the sack over his head and shoulders. “Want to join me under this, or are ye for bed?”

“Nay, I’m all right.” Buck pulled his slouch hat lower and sat hunched, toes as close to the remnants of the fire as he could get.

Roger drew his knees up and tucked in the ends of the bed sack. The rain made a gentle pittering on the canvas, and in the fatigue of exhaustion and cold, but with the comfort of a full stomach, he allowed himself the further comfort of imagining Bree. He did this only at night but looked forward to it with a greater anticipation than he did supper.

He envisioned her in his arms, sitting between his knees, her head lying back on his shoulder, snug under the canvas with him and her soft hair spangled with raindrops that caught the faint light of the fire. Warm, solid, breathing against his chest, his heart slowing to beat with hers …

“I wonder what I’d say to my own father,” Buck said suddenly. “Had I ever kent him, I mean.” He blinked at Roger from under the shadowed brim of his hat. “Did yours—does he, I mean—know about you?”

Roger suppressed his annoyance at being disturbed in his fantasy, but answered shortly. “Yes. I was born before he disappeared.”

“Oh.” Buck rocked back a little, looking meditative, but said no more. Roger found, though, that the interruption had made his wife vanish. He concentrated, trying to bring her back, imagining her in the kitchen at Lallybroch, the steam of cooking rising up around her, making wisps of red hair curl round her face and moisture gleam on the long straight bridge of her nose …

What he was hearing, though, was her arguing with him about whether he should tell Buck the truth of his begetting.

“Don’t you think he has a right to know?” she’d said. “Wouldn’t you want to know something like that?”

“Actually, I don’t think I would,” he’d said at the time. But now …

“Do you know who your father was?” Roger asked suddenly. The question had been in his mind for months, he unsure whether he had any right to ask it.

Buck gave him a baffled, faintly hostile glance.

“What the devil d’ye mean by that? Of course I do—or did. He’s dead now.” His face twisted suddenly, realizing. “Or—”

“Or maybe he’s not, since ye’re not born yet. Aye, it gets to ye after a bit, doesn’t it?”

Apparently, it had just gotten to Buck. He stood up abruptly and stalked off. He stayed gone for a good ten minutes, giving Roger time to regret saying anything. But at last Buck came out of the dark and sat down again by the smoldering peat. He sat with his knees pulled up, arms locked round them.

“What did ye mean by that?” he asked abruptly. “Did I ken my father, and that.”

Roger took in a deep breath of damp grass, pine needles, and peat smoke. “I mean ye werena born to the house ye grew up in. Did ye ken that?”

Buck looked wary and slightly bewildered. “Aye,” he said slowly. “Or– not kent it straight out, I mean. My parents didna have any bairns besides me, so I thought there was maybe—well, I thought I was likely a bastard born to my father’s sister. She died, they said, about the time I was born, and she wasna marrit, so …” He shrugged, one-shouldered. “So, no.” He turned his head and looked at Roger, expressionless. “How d’ye come to know, yourself?”

“Brianna’s mother.” He felt a sharp, sudden longing for Claire and was surprised at it. “She was a traveler. But she was at Leoch, about that time. And she told us what happened.” He had the hollow-bellied feel of one about to jump off a precipice into water of unknown depth, but there was no way to stop now.

“Your father was Dougal MacKenzie of Castle Leoch—war chieftain of the clan MacKenzie. And your mother was a witch named Geillis.”

Buck’s face was absolutely blank, the faint firelight shimmering on the broad cheekbones that were his father’s legacy. Roger wanted suddenly to go and take the man in his arms, smooth the hair back from his face, comfort him like a child—like the child he could so plainly see in those wide, stunned green eyes. Instead, he got up and went off into the night, giving his four-times great-grandfather what privacy he could in which to deal with the news.



IT HADN’T HURT. Roger woke coughing, and drops of moisture rolled tickling down his temples, dislodged by the motion. He was sleeping under the empty canvas bed sack rather than on it, valuing its water-resilience more than its potential comfort when stuffed with grass, but he hadn’t been able to bear having it over his head.

He put a hand cautiously to his throat, feeling the thickened line of the rope scar cutting across the lower swell of his larynx. He rolled over, lifted himself on one elbow, and cleared his throat experimentally. It didn’t hurt this time, either.

“Do you know what a hyoid bone is?” He did; as a result of a number of medical consultations about his damaged voice, he understood the anatomy of his throat quite well. And thus had known what Dr. McEwan meant; his own hyoid was placed slightly higher and farther back than the usual, a fortunate circumstance that had saved his life when he was hanged, as the crushing of that wee bone would have suffocated him.

Had he been dreaming of McEwan? Or of being hanged? Yes, that. He’d had dreams like that often in the months afterward, though they’d grown less frequent in later years. But he remembered looking up through the lacy branches of the tree, seeing—in the dream—the rope tied to the branch above him, and the desperate struggle to scream a protest through the gag in his mouth. Then the ineluctable sliding under him as the horse he sat on was led away … but this time it hadn’t hurt. His feet had struck the ground and he waked—but waked without the choking or the burning, stabbing sensations that left him gasping and gritting his teeth.

He glanced across; yes, Buck was still there, huddled up under the ragged plaid he’d bought from Cumberpatch. Wise purchase.

He lay back down on his side, hauling the canvas up to shield his face while still allowing him to breathe. He’d admit to a feeling of relief at seeing Buck; he’d half-expected the man to decamp and head straight back to Castle Leoch after hearing the truth about his own family. Though, in justice to Buck, he wasn’t a sneak. If he’d made up his mind to do that, he’d likely say so—after punching Roger in the nose for not telling him sooner.

As it was, he’d been there, staring into the ashes of the fire when Roger came back. He hadn’t looked up, and Roger hadn’t said anything to him but had sat down and taken out needle and thread to mend a rip in the seam of his coat.

After a bit, though, Buck had stirred himself.

“Why wait to tell me now?” he’d asked quietly. His voice held no particular note of accusation. “Why not tell me while we were still near Leoch and Cranesmuir?”

“I hadn’t made up my mind to tell ye at all,” Roger had said bluntly. “It was just thinking about—well, about what we’re doing and what might happen. I thought of a sudden that maybe ye should know. And …” He hesitated for a moment. “I didn’t plan it, but it’s maybe better so. Ye’ll have time to think, maybe, whether ye want to find your parents before we go back.”

Buck had merely grunted in reply to that and said no more. But it wasn’t Buck’s response that was occupying Roger’s mind at the moment.

It hadn’t hurt when he’d cleared his throat while talking to Buck, though he hadn’t noticed consciously at the time.

McEwan—was it what he’d done, his touch? Roger wished he’d been able to see whether McEwan’s hand shed blue light when he’d touched Roger’s damaged throat.

And what about that light? He thought that Claire had mentioned something like it once—oh, yes, describing how Master Raymond had healed her, following the miscarriage she’d had in Paris. Seeing her bones glow blue inside her body was how she’d put it, he thought.

Now, that was a staggering thought—was it a familial trait, common to time travelers? He yawned hugely and swallowed once more, experimentally. No pain.

He couldn’t keep track of his thoughts any longer. Felt sleep spreading through his body like good whisky, warming him. And let go, finally, wondering what he might say to his father. If …



A MAN TO DO A MAN’S JOB

Boston, MA

December 8, 1980

GAIL ABERNATHY provided a quick but solid supper of spaghetti with meatballs, salad, garlic bread, and—after a quick, penetrating look at Bree—a bottle of wine, despite Brianna’s protests.

“You’re spending the night here,” Gail said, in a tone brooking no opposition, and pointed at the bottle. “And you’re drinking that. I don’t know what you’ve been doing to yourself, girl, and you don’t need to tell me—but you need to stop doing it.”

“I wish I could.” But her heart had risen the moment she walked through the familiar door, and her sense of agitation did subside—though it was far from disappearing. The wine helped, though.

The Abernathys helped more. Just the sense of being with friends, of not being alone with the kids and the fear and uncertainty. She went from wanting to cry to wanting to laugh and back again in the space of seconds, and felt that if Gail and Joe had not been there, she might have had no choice but to go into the bathroom, turn on the shower, and scream into a folded bath towel—her only safety valve in the last few days.

But now there was at least someone to talk to. She didn’t know whether Joe could offer anything beyond a sympathetic ear, but at the moment that was worth more to her than anything.

Conversation over dinner was light and kid-oriented, Gail asking Mandy whether she liked Barbies and whether her Barbie had a car, and Joe talking soccer versus baseball—Jem was a hard-core Red Sox fan, being allowed to stay up to ungodly hours to listen to rare radio broadcasts with his mother. Brianna contributed nothing more than the occasional smile and felt the tension slowly leave her neck and shoulders.

It came back, though with less force, when dinner was over and Mandy—half-asleep with her arm in her plate—was carried off to bed by Gail, humming “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” in a voice like a cello. Bree rose to pick up the dirty plates, but Joe waved her back, rising from his chair.

“Leave them, darlin’. Come talk to me in the den. Bring the rest of the wine,” he added, then smiled at Jem. “Jem, whyn’t you go up and ask Gail can you watch TV in the bedroom?”

Jem had a smudge of spaghetti sauce at the corner of his mouth, and his hair was sticking up on one side in porcupine spikes. He was a little pale from the journey, but the food had restored him and his eyes were bright, alert.

“No, sir,” he said respectfully, and pushed back his own chair. “I’ll stay with my mam.”

“You don’t need to do that, honey,” she said. “Uncle Joe and I have grown-up things we need to talk about. You—”

“I’m staying.”

She gave him a hard look, but recognized instantly, with a combination of horror and fascination, a Fraser male with his mind made up.

His lower lip was trembling, just a little. He shut his mouth hard to stop it and looked soberly from her to Joe, then back.

“Dad’s not here,” he said, and swallowed. “And neither is Grandda. I’m … I’m staying.”

She couldn’t speak. Joe nodded, though, as soberly as Jem, took a can of Coke from the refrigerator, and led the way to the den. She followed them, clutching the wine bottle and two glasses.

“Bree, darlin’?” Joe turned back for a moment. “Get another bottle from the cupboard over the stove. This is gonna take some talking.”

It did. Jemmy was on his second Coke—the question of his going to bed, let alone to sleep, was clearly academic—and the second bottle of wine was one-third down before she’d finished describing the situation—all the situations—and what she thought of doing about them.

“Okay,” Joe said, quite casually. “I don’t believe I’m saying this, but you need to decide whether to go through some rocks in North Carolina or in Scotland and end up in the eighteenth century either way, is that it?”

“That’s … most of it.” She took a swallow of wine; it seemed to steady her. “But that’s the first thing, yes. See, I know where Mama and Da are—were—at the end of 1778, and that’s the year we’d go back to, if everything works the way it seems to have worked before. They’ll either be back on Fraser’s Ridge or on their way there.”

Jem’s face lightened a little at that, but he didn’t say anything. She met his eyes directly.

“I was going to take you and Mandy through the stones on Ocracoke—where we came through before, you remember? On the island?”

“Vroom,” he said very softly, and broke into a sudden grin, reliving his first exposure to automobiles.

“Yes,” she said, smiling back despite herself. “Then we could go to the Ridge, and I was going to leave you with Grannie and Grandda while I went to Scotland to find Daddy.”

Jem’s smile faded, and his red brows drew together.

“Pardon my pointing out the obvious,” Joe said. “But wasn’t there a war going on in 1778?”

“There was,” she said tersely. “And, yes, it might be a little bit difficult to get a ship from North Carolina to Scotland, but believe you me, I could do it.”

“Oh, I do,” he assured her. “It would be easier—and safer, I reckon—than going through in Scotland and searching for Roger with Jem and Mandy to look after at the same time, but—”

“I don’t need looking after!”

“Maybe not,” Joe told him, “but you got about six years, sixty pounds, and another two feet to grow before you can look after your mama. ’Til you get big enough that nobody can just pick you up and carry you off, she’s got to worry about you.”

Jem looked as if he wanted to argue the point, but he was at the age where logic did sometimes prevail, and happily this was one of those times. He made a small “mmphm” sound in his throat, which startled Bree, and sat back on the ottoman, still frowning.

“But you can’t go to where Grannie and Grandda are,” he pointed out. “ ’Cuz Dad’s not where—I mean when—you thought. He’s not in the same time they are.”

“Bingo,” she said briefly, and, reaching into the pocket of her sweater, carefully withdrew the plastic bag protecting Roger’s letter. She handed it to Joe. “Read that.”

He whipped his reading glasses out of his own pocket and, with them perched on his nose, read the letter carefully, looked up at her, wide-eyed, then bent his head and read it again. After which he sat quite still for several minutes, staring into space, the letter open on his knee.

At last, he heaved a sigh, folded the letter carefully, and handed it back to her.

“So now it’s space and time,” he said. “You ever watch Doctor Who on PBS?”

“All the time,” she said dryly, “on the BBC. And don’t think I wouldn’t sell my soul for a TARDIS.”

Jem made the little Scottish noise again, and Brianna looked sideways at him.

“Are you doing that on purpose?”

He looked up at her, surprised. “Doing what?”

“Never mind. When you are fifteen, I’m locking you in the cellar.”

“What? Why?” he demanded indignantly.

“Because that’s when your father and grandfather started getting into real trouble, and evidently you’re going to be just like them.”

“Oh.” He seemed pleased to hear this, and subsided.

“Well, putting aside the possibility of getting hold of a working TARDIS …” Joe leaned forward, topping up both glasses of wine. “It’s possible to travel farther than you thought, because Roger and this Buck guy just did it. So you think you could do it, too?”

“I’ve got to,” she said simply. “He won’t try to come back without Jem, so I have to go find him.”

“Do you know how he did it? You told me it took gemstones to do it. Did he have, like, a special kind of gem?”

“No.” She frowned, remembering the effort of using the kitchen shears to snip apart the old brooch with its scatter of chip-like diamonds. “They each had a few tiny little diamonds—but Roger went through before with a single biggish diamond. He said it was like the other times we know about; it exploded or vaporized or something—just a smear of soot in his pocket.”

“Mmm.” Joe took a sip of wine and held it meditatively in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. “Hypothesis one, then: number is more important than size—i.e., you can go farther if you have more stones in your pocket.”

She stared at him for a moment, somewhat taken aback.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said slowly. “The first time he tried it, though … he had his mother’s locket; that had garnets on it. Definitely garnets, plural. But he didn’t get through—he was thrown back, on fire.” She shuddered briefly, the sudden vision of Mandy flung on the ground, burning … She gulped wine and coughed. “So—so we don’t know whether he might have gone farther if he had gone through.”

“It’s just a thought,” Joe said mildly, watching her. “Now … Roger’s mentioning Jeremiah here, and it sounds like he means there’s somebody besides Jemmy who’s got that name. Do you know what he means?”

“I do.” A skitter of something between fear and excitement ran down her back with icy little feet, and she took another swallow of wine and a deep breath before telling him about Jerry MacKenzie. The circumstances of his disappearance—and what her mother had told Roger.

“She thought he was very likely an accidental traveler. One who—who couldn’t get back.” She took another quick sip.

“That’s my other grandda?” Jemmy asked. His face flushed a little at the thought and he sat forward, hands clutched between his thighs. “If we go where Dad is, will we get to meet him, too?”

“I can’t even think about that,” she told him honestly, though the suggestion made her insides curl up. Among the million alarming contingencies of the current situation, the possibility of meeting her deceased father-in-law face-to-face was about 999,999th on the list of Things to Be Worried About—but apparently it was on the list.

“But what did Roger mean about seeking Jeremiah?” Joe asked, clinging stubbornly to the point.

“We think that’s how you … steer,” Brianna said. “Focusing your thoughts on a particular person who’s in the time you want to go to. We don’t know that for sure, though,” she added, and stifled a small belch. “Each time we—or Mama—did it, it was always two hundred and two years. And it was when Mama went back the first time—though come to think of it,” she added, frowning, “she thought it might have been because Black Jack Randall—Daddy’s ancestor—was there. He was the first person she met when she came through the stones. She said he looked a lot like Daddy.”

“Uh-huh.” Joe poured another half glass and stared at it for a moment, as though hypnotized by the soft reddish light glowing in its bowl. “But.” He stopped, marshaling his thoughts. “But other people did go farther. This Geillis your mother mentioned, and Buck? Did he—never mind. Roger and Buck did do it this time, for sure. So it’s possible; we just don’t know how.”

“I was forgetting Geillis,” Bree said slowly. She’d seen the woman only once, and very briefly. A tall, slender figure, fair hair flying in the wind of a murderous fire, her shadow thrown onto one of the standing stones, enormous, elongated.

“Now that I think, though … I don’t believe she had gemstones when she went back. She thought it took … er … sacrifice.” She glanced at Jem, then looked at Joe, lowering her brows with a meaningful look that said, “Don’t ask.” “And fire. And she never came back the other way, though she planned to, with stones.” And suddenly a penny that she hadn’t known was there dropped. “She told Mama about using stones—not the other way around. So somebody … somebody else told her.”

Joe digested that one for a moment, but then shook his head, dismissing the distraction.

“Huh. Okay, Hypothesis two: focusing your thoughts on a particular person helps you go to where they are. That make sense to you, Jem?” he asked, turning to Jemmy, who nodded.

“Sure. If it’s somebody you know.”

“Okay. Then—” Joe stopped abruptly, looking at Jem. “If it’s somebody you know?”

The icy centipede came rippling up Bree’s backbone and into her hair, making her scalp contract.

“Jem.” Her voice sounded odd to her own ears, husky and half breathless. “Mandy says she can hear you—in her head. Can you … hear her?” She swallowed, hard, and her voice came clearer. “Can you hear Daddy that way?”

The small red brows drew together in a puzzled frown.

“Sure. Can’t you?”



THE DEEP LINE between Uncle Joe’s eyebrows hadn’t gone away since the night before, Jem saw. He still looked friendly; he nodded at Jem and pushed a cup of hot chocolate across the counter to him, but his eyes kept going back to Mam, and every time they did, the line got deeper.

Mam was buttering Mandy’s toast. Jem thought she wasn’t as worried as she had been, and felt a little better himself. He’d slept all night, for the first time in a long time, and he thought maybe Mam had, too. No matter how tired he was, he usually woke up every couple of hours, listening out for noises, and then listening harder to be sure Mandy and Mam were still breathing. He had nightmares where they weren’t.