26. Pawprints
26
PAWPRINTS
’Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly
— ANONYMOUS NINTH-CENTURY POET, “PANGUR BAN”
“ R eina?” I answered as I collapsed onto the couch.
“Are you okay? I couldn’t See what happened before, but it felt…big. Now I can See you, and you look awful. He’s gone?”
“Oh, he’s gone, all right,” I said, then told her everything that had happened.
“You kissed him?”
The sky seemed to answer with another round of lightning and thunder.
“Of all the things I’ve just revealed, that’s the part you are holding onto?”
“I’m just stunned. You , of all people. And… him ?”
“I was lost in the moment. In the whole day, really.” I was grumbling now. It was embarrassing how quickly I’d lost my head.
He wasn’t a seer, but I was starting to wonder if Jonathan Lynch had his own methods of mind bending. Otherwise, what explained that sudden desire? A need, even?
Before she could answer, the kettle on the stove whistled. The long spiral cord of the phone stretched across the room as I took it with me. My stomach was completely tied into knots.
“Are you okay?” Reina asked again.
“I’m fine. Shocked and scared, but I’m okay.”
“Good. But you need to get out of there. Come back to Portland. We can call the crematorium and have them send Penny’s ashes to my house and leave that creepy wizard out of it. You have the will and the letter he gave you?”
I nodded, knowing she was watching while I poured the hot water and bobbed the tea bag up and down in the cup. Greenish tendrils of peppermint seeped into the hot water. A bottle of Bushmills next to the sugar jar caught my eye. Without a second thought, I tossed my tea down the sink and poured a sizable tot of whiskey into the mug.
“Hey, you need to drive. Get your stuff packed up and lock up the house.”
Outside, the thunder seemed to laugh at her.
“There’s a squall going right now,” I said. “Ten to one, the 101 is already washed out. I’ll have to wait. Plus I still have to finish cleansing the house?—”
“There’s no time for that,” Reina interrupted. “As soon as the storm lets up, get your ass in the car and back to Portland. Then we’ll call…I don’t know, someone. Those people in Ireland, maybe. Or your mother. I know you don’t want to, but she might know something about this Magi business and what to do about it.”
At that idea, I took a long swig directly from the bottle. The whiskey burned my throat, but it didn’t numb the dread building in my belly.
I didn’t want to see Sibyl. I didn’t want to deal with any of this. All I wanted was to go back to Boston, back to my real, staid life, where the most excitement I encountered on a daily basis were the crumbling memories of thousand-year-old accounts of Cú Chulainn. I had a chapter to finish, a dissertation to defend, and a job to start. Now I was supposed to bring my grandmother’s ashes to Ireland and investigate her paranormal murderer whose probable son was tracking me around the country like his own personal quarry.
But Jonathan had already chased me down there and stalked me for who knew how long. He had seen Reina at the bar and knew where she lived. He had my mother’s address too. He knew everyone I could possibly go to with my concerns, just like he knew that I was fundamentally alone in the fae world without them.
I had no allies.
Not one.
“I can’t do that, Rein. I can’t bring this down on you or Sybil.” I carried my whiskey to the couch, then took another big drink and rubbed my head, which was still throbbing from the tumble I had taken. What did it matter if I was drunk? I was no better here than anywhere else.
“I’m not leaving you to do this alone. At least here you aren’t stuck out in the woods all by yourself.”
“This killer—Jonathan’s dad , for Pete’s sake—literally squeezed the life out of Gran like she was nothing but a bug in a fly trap. You think I want to bring him or his son to your doorstep? Absolutely not.”
I could easily imagine her pacing frantically across the on-call room. Strangely, my own fear was abating. I threw another log on the fire and watched it crackle as the flames overtook it.
Outside, the thunder rumbled again, but lower now. Almost like a cat’s purr.
Somehow, I had been able to keep Jonathan out of the house. I had told him to go—okay, shrieked at him—and pushed him. And he had done it.
It wasn’t what I was supposed to do. But it had worked. And I knew without a doubt, I would do it again if I was forced.
“Cassandra, this isn’t funny. You need to?—”
“Reina,” I interrupted. “He knows where you are, he knows where I am, and he’ll figure out where everyone else I know lives too. What he doesn’t know is where I’m going now. But I know I can keep him away from me.”
“But, Cass, you can’t just?—”
“Rein, stop,” I said gently. “Here’s my plan. I’m going to call the mortuary and have the ashes sent to you. That okay?”
“Sure. But Cass, come on?—”
“And then I’m going to disappear for a while. I’ll let my committee know I’m finishing my dissertation remotely while I deal with family issues. My chair will put up a fuss, but the department won’t fight it. I’m also going to defer my position for next year and just take some time. Gran left me some money, and I have a bit of savings. I’ll be fine. I’m going to finish this damn degree and figure out what’s next. But you won’t hear from me for a while. Don’t Look, okay? It’s better that way, to keep you safe.”
I took another drink of whiskey as the inevitability of the plan sank in with it. Like the whiskey, it burned.
“Cass…”
I could hear the pleading in my friend’s voice, but the fight in it was gone. She knew when my mind was made up.
“Keep her safe for me, Rein,” I said. “Okay?”
But before she could answer, the world disappeared.
A thick, impenetrable darkness of sight and sound and breath choked it all out of me.
“Cass?”
Reina’s voice seemed a million miles away, a tiny buzz against the opacity that encompassed everything.
“Cass? Are you there?”
I was bound. By what, I couldn’t tell, but every part of me was squeezed as if I were a tube of toothpaste. The living room looked as if it were covered by a heavy black veil, and my mouth seemed to be glued shut. My ears felt like they had been stuffed with cotton to the point where I was deaf to everything except a lurid, inscrutable murmuring.
It was so much worse, I would later recall. So much worse than I had Seen through any of her memories .
It was the shadowed man in the fedora. The monster who had literally wrung Gran’s life from her as if she were a twisted kitchen rag.
Oh, goddess , I thought, strangely calm. This is it. He’s back and now he’s taking my memories and killing me too.
The murmuring coalesced into a deep hum of one thought, one desire. It vibrated through my bones, a bass thrum that seemed to rise from the earth itself. It was deep, male, almost unnoticeable yet undeniable at the same time.
Tell me.
What? I thought, unable to speak. What do you want?
To my surprise, he answered. Tell me where it is.
His desire split, less because he wanted it and more because he seemed…unable to articulate it. Speaking seemed to be difficult.
But he was very single-minded.
Tell me the Ssssecret.
He wanted…the box?
An overwhelming sense of eagerness pierced the veil, confirming that I was correct and that I had also just informed him of what it was he sought. The murmuring continued—it never stopped—and I immediately thought, no . This man could not, under any circumstances, get what he wanted. I braced against the unbelievable pressure, which continued to compress everything, including my thoughts, with a kind of pain that would not allow me to think of anything else.
I couldn’t have made him leave if I wanted. Because I couldn’t want. I couldn’t feel anything except the pain.
The first memory dripped out of my brain, searing like alcohol on an open wound. It really did feel like liquid, flowing down my shoulders into the couch. How did that work? But my ponderings were short-lived and then completely erased as the memories started to pour as if I were a wet rag that was being wrung out at last. They streamed over my body, moving through the veil and towards the floor.
At first, I didn’t even recognize them as mine. Early, fragmented encounters of my parents, of Gran, of the tiny discoveries a person makes during their first few years of life. The warmth of my mother’s skin. The chill of a watermelon rind. The ache of a new tooth. The feel of the earth under my feet.
A throb of irritation vibrated from the shadow. The compression doubled, and the memories poured faster, as though my mind were a faucet turned on high. Soon, memories of events I could consciously recollect started. Sybil’s face on my fifth birthday. My first time swimming in the ocean. A smile from my father when I caught my first wave.
NO! Raw, slashing helplessness tore through what little of my being I was aware of. More of my early childhood flowed out of my face, down my body, and into the floorboards. Please! I implored wordlessly, not knowing exactly who or what was the object of my begging. But the memories continued to flow, and I watched as more of my childhood left me for good.
Then, somehow, the faucet stopped. The room expanded to its normal size with another loud clap of thunder.
The storm had picked up again.
The veil dropped, and I found I could move again. I jerked around, ready to fight my attacker, but stopped when I saw a truly enormous cat the color of black-flecked goldenrod hissing at an old man wearing a black trench coat and a fedora shadowed most of his face. What little I could see of the man’s features was creased and ragged, and his hands bore large liver spots of the very old. He was there, but he wasn’t, in and out of focus like a mirage in the desert.
A shriveled grape of a mouth opened to release a stream of incomprehensible words at the cat—the chatter from before, but unobscured by time and perhaps magic too.
The cat bolted around the room, knocking over tables and chairs, running up onto the counter, sending the hanging cast iron pans to the floor with a crash, cracking the tile. The old man continued to chant.
Small objects in the cat’s wake caught on fire and incinerated. Within a minute, the entire room was burning with bright orange flames, the smoke rising into my eyes.
The old man’s voice was shouting now, and the fire chased the cat into a corner of the kitchen. He finished his incantations with a phrase that sounded like, but wasn’t quite, Ipse corvus!
A large raven the color of midnight winged its way through the rising smoke. It flew out the front door and around the house to soar over the ocean, toward the lightning still flaring on the horizon.
“Cassandra!”
I turned, feeling the movement starting to return to my now aching bones. The cat now stood next to me. It stood about three feet from ground to shoulder, with tall ears that peaked into thin white strands of fur that were singed at the tips, matching the minor burns rendering its previously gorgeous coat patchy and desecrated. A bobcat, or maybe a lynx.
Did we have lynxes in Oregon?
A stupid question, considering that I was facing one: a deadly predator was two feet from my face and staring at me with large, dilated eyes the color of lichen.
“Cassandra, run !”
Was this cat talking to me? Had that terrible old man addled my brain’s function along with my memories? The cat nudged my leg with its head, but I could only shake mine. No, I can’t move, I tried to say, but my voice wouldn’t quite return either. At least it didn’t want to harm me.
The smoke was getting thicker, and I watched as the fire licked its way down the hall and around the rest of the living room. And yet, frozen in shock. I couldn’t move. I was going to die here. Just like my grandmother. Just like the shadow wanted.
“Cass!”
When I turned back to the cat, I found Jonathan crouched next to me, breathing heavily in burned, smoking clothes and rubbing his singed eyebrows.
He coughed. “We have to get out of here before this whole place burns to the ground.”
I coughed with him. It was painful, but more movement returned to my limbs. I dropped to my knees, feeling my way through the room that was still slightly blurry, whether from smoke or from the spell.
“Cass, what are you doing? We have to go!””
Jonathan bent toward me, watching with a puzzled expression as I flattened myself against the coarse wood floor. I pressed every part of myself into the boards, nudging my nose, my eyes, my chest, my skin into the warming, familiar surface.
“Come on,” I murmured, pushing my mind to open up further and absorb any remnants of what I had lost. The memories I could gather only came in patches. The touch of a hand, a whiff of a hemlock bough, and a brief melody. He hadn’t taken much, but my earliest memories involved my father. The wood boards grew hotter beneath my touch. On the other side of the counter, the couch burst into flames.
“Please,” I begged the floor, but my assailant had taken most of my lost memories with him over the water. A few more scattered images sank into my mind, but soon I was just a person lying on a burning floor.
“Cassandra, come on!”
A loud pop sounded as a pipe broke in the kitchen. Vaguely, I registered that I was moving— hoisted over someone’s shoulder. Jonathan’s. He carried me out of the house like a sack of wheat and set me down in the passenger seat of the Prius, some fifty yards from the fire.
“No, no, no!” My voice returned with a vengeance. “What are you doing? I wasn’t done!”
But my protests sounded more like sobs as I watched the flames grow higher and turn to thick black smoke. A light drizzle was falling, keeping the fire from jumping into the tree branches and swallowing up the forest too. But the house was gone. Memories were gone. Gran was gone.
Tears burned my smoke-reddened eyes and flowed down my cheeks. The house, too, burned—oh-so-brightly as vivid flames danced in and out of the windows, cracking and shattering them all. A symphony of glass.
“Gran,” I whimpered. “Oh, my home.”
“Cassandra.”
The voice was Jonathan’s. His hand found mine, and compassion bloomed through my grief along with remorse and shame as he pulled me close and wrapped an arm around me, tucking me into his safety and warmth. He murmured something under his breath, something that again sounded like but just wasn’t quite Latin.
The drizzle thickened to a hard downpour, and we watched, clinging to each other, as the flames gradually began to give to the wet. A siren sounded in the distance. I pressed my head into Jonathan’s shoulder and keened loudly, allowing my cries to come as they might.
Rage, I discovered, burned as brightly as any fire. Perhaps my tears, like the rain outside, could start to put them out.