No, Hunter, that’s your daddy’s job,
I told him.
But when that day comes, you call me when you get home and tell me all about it, okay?
Hunter gave me a big-eyed soulful look.
But I’m scared.
I gave him Skeptical.
You may be nervous, but everyone else will feel the same way. This is your chance to make friends, so remember to keep your mouth closed until you’ve gotten everything straight in your head.
Or they won’t like me?
No!
I said, wanting to be absolutely clear.
They won’t understand you. There’s a big difference.
You like me?
“You little rascal, you know I like you,” I said, smiling at him and brushing his hair back. I glanced over at Remy, standing in line at the counter to order our Blizzards. He waved to me and made a face at Hunter. Remy was making a huge effort to take all this in stride. He was growing into his role as father of an exceptional child.
I figured he might get to relax in twelve years, give or take a few.
You know your dad loves you, and you know he wants what’s best for you,
I said.
He wants me to be like all the other kids,
Hunter said, half-sad, halfresentful.
He wants you to be happy. And he knows that the more people who know about this gift you have, the chances are you won’t be happy. I know it’s not fair to tell you that you have to keep a secret. But this is the only secret you have to keep. If anyone talks to you about it, tell your dad or call me. If you think someone’s weird, you tell your dad. If someone tries to bad-touch you, you tell.
I’d just scared him now. But he swallowed and said,
I know about bad touching
.
You’re a smart boy, and you’re going to have lots of friends. This is just a thing about you they don’t need to know.
Because it’s bad?
Hunter’s face looked pinched and desperate.
Heck, no!
I said, outraged.
Nothing wrong with you, buddy. But you know what we are is different, and people don’t always understand different.
End of lecture. I gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“Hunter, you get us some napkins,” I said in the regular way, as Remy picked up the plastic tray with our Blizzards. I’d gotten a chocolate chip one, and my mouth was watering when we’d distributed the napkins and dug into our separate cups of sinful goodness.
A young woman with chin-length black hair came into the restaurant, spotted us, and waved in an uncertain way.
“Look, Sport, it’s Erin,” Remy said.
“Hey, Erin!” Hunter waved back enthusiastically, his hand moving like a little metronome.
Erin came over, still looking as though she weren’t sure of her welcome.
“Hi,” she said, looking around the table. “Mr. Hunter, sir, it’s good to see you this fine afternoon!” Hunter beamed back at her. He liked being called “Mr. Hunter.” Erin had cute round cheeks, and her almond eyes were a rich brown.
“This is my Aunt Sookie!” Hunter said with pride.
“Sookie, this is Erin,” Remy said. I could tell from his thoughts that he liked the young woman more than a little.
“Erin, I’ve heard so much about you,” I said. “It’s nice to put a face with the name. Hunter wanted me to come over to go around the kindergarten rooms with him.”
“How did that go?” Erin asked, genuinely interested.
Hunter started to tell her all about it, and Remy jumped up to pull over a chair for Erin.
We had a good time after that. Hunter seemed to be really fond of Erin, and Erin returned the feeling. Erin was also
quite
interested in Hunter’s dad, and Remy was on the verge of being nuts about her. All in all, it wasn’t a bad afternoon to be able to read minds, I figured.
Hunter said, “Miss Erin, Aunt Sookie says she can’t go with me to the first day of school. Would you?”
Erin was both startled and pleased. “If your dad says it’s okay, and if I can get off work,” she said, careful to put some conditions on it in case Remy had some objection . . . or they’d quit dating by late August. “You’re so sweet to ask me.”
While Remy took Hunter to the men’s room, Erin and I were left to regard each other with curiosity.
“How long have you and Remy been seeing each other?” I asked. That seemed safe enough.
“Just a month,” she said. “I like Remy, and I think we might have something, but it’s too soon to tell. I don’t want Hunter to start depending on me in case it doesn’t work out. Plus . . .” She hesitated for a long minute. “I understand that Kristen Duchesne thought there was something wrong with Hunter. She told everyone that. But I really care about that little boy.” The question was clear in her eyes.
“He’s different,” I said, “but there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s not mentally ill, he doesn’t have a learning disability, and he’s not possessed by the devil.” I was smiling, just a little, when I got to the end of the sentence.
“I’d never seen any signs of that,” she agreed. She was smiling, too. “I don’t think I’ve seen the whole picture, though.”
I wasn’t about to tell Hunter’s secret. “He needs special love and care,” I said. “He’s never really had a mom, and I’m sure having someone stable in his life, filling that role, would help.”
“And that’s not going to be you.” She said that as if she were half asking a question.
“No,” I said, relieved to get a chance to set the record straight. “That’s not going to be me. Remy seems like a nice guy, but I’m seeing someone else.” I scraped up one more spoonful of chocolate and sugar.
Erin looked down at her glass of Pepsi, thinking her own thoughts. Of course, I was thinking them right along with her. She’d never liked Kristen and didn’t think much of her mental ability. She did like Remy, more and more. And she loved Hunter. “Okay,” she said, having reached an inner conclusion. “Okay.”
She looked up at me and nodded. I nodded right back. It seemed we’d arrived at an understanding. When the menfolk came back from their trip to the restroom, I said good-bye to them.
“Oh, wait, Remy, can you step outside for a minute with me, if Erin wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on Hunter?”
“I’d love to,” she said. I hugged Hunter again and gave him a pat and a smile as I moved toward the door.
Remy followed me, an apprehensive expression on his face. We stood a little away from the door.
“You know Hadley left the rest of her estate to me,” I said. This had been weighing on me.
“The lawyer told me.” Remy’s face wasn’t giving anything away, but of course I have other methods. He was calm through and through.
“You aren’t mad?”
“No, I don’t want nothing of Hadley’s.”
“But for Hunter . . . his college. There wasn’t much cash, but there was some good jewelry, and I could sell it.”
“I got a college fund started for him,” Remy said. “One of my great-aunts says she’s going to leave what she’s got to him since she doesn’t have any kids of her own. Hadley put me through hell, and she didn’t even care enough about Hunter to plan for him. I don’t want it.”
“In all fairness, she didn’t expect to die young. . . . In fact, she didn’t expect to die
ever
,” I said. “It’s my belief she didn’t put Hunter in her will because she didn’t want anyone to know about him and come looking for him to use him as a hostage for her good behavior.”
“I hope that’s the case,” Remy said. “I mean, I hope she thought about him. But taking her money, knowing how she turned out, how she earned it . . . that would make me feel sick.”
“All right,” I said. “If you think it over and change your mind, call me by tomorrow night! You never know when I might go on a spending spree or put that jewelry down on the table at one of the casinos.”
He smiled, just a little. “You’re a good woman,” he said, and returned to his girlfriend and his son.
I started the drive home with a clear conscience and a happier heart.
I’d worked half of the early shift that day (Holly had taken my half and her own shift), so I was free. I thought of brooding over Gran’s letter a little more. Mr. Cataliades’s visit to us when we were babies, the cluviel dor, the deceptions Gran’s lover had practiced on her . . . Because surely when Gran had thought she
smelled
Fintan when she was
seeing
her husband, she was seeing Fintan in disguise. It was hard to absorb.
Amelia and Bob were busy casting spells when I got back. They were walking around the perimeter of the house in opposite directions, chanting and swinging incense like the priests in the Catholic Church.
Some days I realized it was all to the good that I lived out in the country.
I didn’t want to break their concentration, so I wandered off into the woods. I wondered where the portal was, if I could recognize it. “A thin place,” Dermot had called it. Could I spot a thin place? At least I knew the general direction, and I started east.
It was a warm afternoon, and I began sweating the minute I started to make my way through the woods. The sun broke through the branches in a thousand patterns, and the birds and the bugs made the thousand noises that left the woods anything but silent. It wouldn’t be long until evening closed in and the light would fracture and slant, making the footing uncertain. The birds would fall silent, and the night creatures would make their own harmony.
I picked my way through the undergrowth, thinking of the night before. I wondered if Judith had packed all her things and left, as she’d said she would. I wondered if Bill felt lonely now that she was gone. I assumed nothing and no one had popped up in my yard the night before, since I’d slept through the hours of the dark and into the morning.
Then all I had left to wonder about was when Sandra Pelt would try to kill me again. Just as I began to suspect that being alone in the woods wasn’t a good idea, I stepped into a tiny clearing about a quarter of a mile, or less, slightly southeast of my back door.
I was pretty sure this was the thin place, this little clearing. For one thing, there was no reason for it to be clear that I could see. There were wild grasses growing thickly, but there were no bushes, nothing above calf-high. No vines stretched across the area, no branches drooped over it.
Before I stepped out of the trees, I gave the ground a very careful examination. The last thing I needed was to be caught in some kind of fairy booby trap. But I couldn’t see anything extraordinary, except perhaps . . . a slight wavering in the air. Right in the middle of the clearing. The odd spot—if I was even seeing it right—hovered at the height of my knees. It was the shape of a small and irregular circle, perhaps fifteen inches in diameter. And in just that spot, the air seemed to distort, a little like a heat illusion. Was it actually hot? I wondered.
I knelt in the weeds about an arm’s length from the wobbly air. I plucked a long blade of grass and very nervously poked it into the distorted area.
I let go of it, and it vanished. I snatched my fingers back and yipped with surprise.
I’d established something. I wasn’t sure what. If I’d doubted Claude’s word, here was verification he’d been telling me the truth. Very carefully, I moved a little closer to the wavery patch. “Hi, Niall,” I said. “If you’re listening, if you’re there. I miss you.”
Of course, there came no answer.
“I have a lot of troubles, but I expect you do, too,” I said, not wanting to sound whiny. “I don’t know how Faery fits into this world. Are you all walking around us, but invisible? Or do you have a whole’nother world, like Atlantis?” This was a pretty weak and one-sided conversation. “Well, I better go back to the house before it gets dark. If you need me, come see me. I do miss you,” I said again.
Nothing continued to happen.
Feeling both pleased that I’d found the thin spot and disappointed that nothing had changed as a result, I made my way back through the woods to the house. Bob and Amelia had finished their magical doings in the yard, and Bob had fired up the grill. He and Amelia were going to cook steaks. Though I’d had ice cream with Remy and Hunter, I couldn’t turn down grilled steak rubbed with Bob’s secret seasoning. Amelia was cutting up potatoes to wrap in foil to go on the grill, too. I was pleased as punch. I volunteered to cook some crookneck squash.
The house felt happier. And safer.
While we ate, Amelia told us funny stories about working in the Genuine Magic Shop, and Bob unbent enough to imitate some of his odder colleagues in the unisex hair salon where he worked. The hairdresser Bob replaced had become so discouraged by the complications of life in post-Katrina New Orleans that she’d loaded up her car and left for Miami. Bob had gotten the job by being the first qualified person to walk in the door after the previous one had walked out. In answer to my question about whether that had been sheer coincidence, Bob just smiled. Every now and then, I saw a flash of what fascinated Amelia about Bob, who otherwise looked like a skinny, rough-haired encyclopedia salesman. I told him about Immanuel and my emergency haircut, and he said Immanuel had done a wonderful job.
“So, the work on the wards is all done?” I asked anxiously, trying to sound casual about the change of topic.
“You bet,” Amelia said, looking proud. She cut another bite of steak. “They’re even better now. A dragon couldn’t get through ’em. No one who means you harm will make it.”
“So if a dragon was friendly . . .” I said, half teasing, and she swatted me with her fork.
“No such thing, the way I hear tell,” Amelia said. “Of course, I’ve never seen one.”
“Of course.” I didn’t know whether to feel curious or relieved.
Bob said, “Amelia’s got a surprise for you.”
“Oh?” I tried to sound more relaxed than I felt.
“I found the cure,” she said, half-proudly and half-shyly. “I mean, you did ask me to when I left. I kept looking for a way to break the blood bond. I found it.”