Chapter 2 #3
That was Ross’s preferred course, and she acquiesced with as much grace as she could manage, leaving Will and Melissa to ramble on for a bit.
Ross took her arm in one hand and the hamper in the other and they retraced their steps as best they could.
Within three minutes they met one of the staff picking their way through the trees, sharp-creased uniform and all, as unlikely as if they’d run into Mr Tumnus doing his Christmas shopping.
The young woman—it wasn’t anyone Elena remembered from before, making her wonder just how many people the Enderboughs had hired for this little get together—offered them an umbrella and said that she’d been asked to encourage people to return to the house, as being out in the grounds after dark was not recommended.
Still hobbling, Elena could only agree. They sent the woman off after Will and Melissa and, soon after, the lights of the house were visible through the trees.
That was how Elena got to meet Neera Enderbough, the woman who’d turned down the Nobel Prize nomination.
Ross had brought her to yet another room she’d never seen before, this one a study with fish and birds and pinned butterflies cluttering the shelves in a triumph of taxidermy over taxonomy.
Elena was plumped down into an overstuffed leather armchair with her leg on a footstool.
An odd experience, to have a world-class biochemistry prodigy checking over her slightly sprained ankle.
Neera was of that middle generation that included Uncle Jas and Ross’s dad.
She was handsome, strong-chinned, with the barest concession towards make-up.
Her eyes were astonishing, almost amber.
She was also one of the few members of the family who weren’t straight up white.
Her mother, Elena gathered, was something big in the tech industry in India.
Not here for the family get-together then?
Neera shook her head, looking amused, and Elena tried to puzzle out that expression and the thoughts behind it.
Neera’s father was here, certainly. One of the silver-haired patriarchs on the elders’ table at breakfast. And Elena would have assumed a race thing, because she reckoned some problems worked the same whichever side of the Atlantic you were on.
Except Neera caught her look, as she wrapped something self-cooling and flexible about Elena’s ankle, and her lips quirked.
“This here is Enderboughs only,” she said. “The real family. A tradition, you know? Marrying into the clade isn’t enough to secure an invitation.”
“Right,” Elena said, and then “Oh. Oh, I see.” Shrinking a bit before that cool, amused gaze. “I, er…” She looked at Ross. “Someone maybe didn’t explain that.”
“Someone maybe didn’t explain that to me,” he said.
“Gil was never the best communicator,” Neera said smoothly. “There. Keep that on until you go to bed. You’ll be turning cartwheels by next morning.”
Elena moved her foot experimentally, feeling barely an echo of pain. “That’s…”
“Technically proprietary technology,” Neera said. “I should make you sign an NDA.” She grinned, ten years younger at a stroke, and it was impossible not to smile back. Then there was a commotion outside and Melissa burst in supporting Will, whose tan shirt was all over blood.
Neera descended on him instantly, and everyone else was shooed out of the room. Ross and Elena ended up sitting with Melissa who, now she’d actually got her cousin back to the house, was starting to shake.
“There was…” Her eyes were very wide, the pupils huge like she was desperately trying to drag in any sign of danger from all over. “Something in the trees. We thought it was an owl. Just… wings, and then…”
It had been dark. The complimentary-umbrella fairy hadn’t found them. They’d already been on their way back, though.
“I mean,” said Ross, “maybe it was,” he shrugged, “an owl. Maybe it was… something like rabies? I mean I’ve seen… birds of prey, you know, their feet… talons, isn’t it?”
“It was like he’d been stabbed.” She mimed jamming something sharp into her upper arm. “I hit it. It was… Not like a bird. I mean it felt solid, heavy. And gone. I could hear it crashing about in the branches. But Will… God, there was so much blood. Fuck!” She clenched her fists. “Fucking owls?”
Will wasn’t at table for the evening meal, but Neera drifted past the kids’ table to say he was fine, just under some painkillers, back on his feet tomorrow probably.
And gone, letting any questions slant from her shoulders, until Melissa actually went so far as to grab her wrist. A frozen moment. A breach of propriety even Elena felt.
“A branch,” Neera said blandly. “Honestly, one day we should cut it all down, or at least hire some proper groundskeepers to clear out all the rot and old growth. But who has time to supervise all of that?” A bright, hollow smile that dared Melissa to contradict her.
“Far too easy to lose your footing, end up scratched, bruised, or apparently even impaled.”
“Doesn’t he need,” Melissa managed, “a doctor? A hospital?”
“We honestly have more doctors and facilities here in this house,” Neera told her. She nodded to a sour, stern-looking man on the middle table. “Don’t you think his father would have already packed him off if there were any danger?”
Melissa’s expression suggested she wasn’t remotely confident of that, but she said nothing.
“I think it’s best, though,” Neera lifted her voice to encompass the whole of the lower table, silencing even the two bickering rugby bros, “that you all make sure you’re inside before dark.
We don’t want this to be the family gathering that gets talked about for the next three generations for all the wrong reasons.
Perhaps stay out of the woods entirely. Someone really needs to get a proper landscaper to look at this place.
” With the absolute and implicit certainty that this would never happen.
And Elena thought about the woods that surrounded the house on all sides, unbroken save for a handful of trails barely wide enough to get the four-by-four down.
And she thought about the fact that one of the staff, that ever-changing lottery of faces, had taken the keys to that four-by-four, and taken it somewhere to park it, and she was willing to bet Ross didn’t know where.
All of a sudden Enderby felt a whole lot more like a prison than a holiday.
An angel, he’d said. And there had been wings, and the thing between the wings had been roughly humanoid, but hideous.
A devil, surely, save that there was a way devils were represented in art, and a way that angels were, indicating the relative attitude of the artists to the former and the latter.
The thing above the door had most certainly been presented from a point of view of adulation and authority.