Fathomless (18 page)

“For their own good.”

“Or because that's just how it is. Like—” He'd better get it over with. “Like last year, I didn't expect to tag along when you were dating a guy. And I won't expect it now, even though the new guy's halfway decent.”

Breathing faster but still sounding breathless, she said, “You were on the stairs.”

“No. I was in the common room. Saw you come out of Daniel's room. Saw him kiss you. So I was trying to sneak down again before you guys caught me.”

“Yeah, well.” Never a coward in the end, Eddy met his eyes. “You caught us first.” Then, reading his stare right, she threw the empty can at him, a painless hit to the chest. “And no, not that. God, Sean.”

He'd caught the can, and he held on to it. “How would I know? And if you had, so what? I mean, if you like him that much.” Because, knowing Eddy, she would have been prepared and all. Right? Damn, Sean wasn't up to being the chaperone around here.

Eddy was fishing around in her back pocket. For a second, the flat square she produced scared Sean with its resemblance to a condom wrapper, but then he saw it was blue cardboard folded over white onionskin. “The fortune from Geldman's?”

“I'm as crazy as you were with Orne's e-mail, carrying it around all the time.” She offered him the blue square.

Sean took it and slipped out the onionskin. The words on it looked like they'd been typed with an old-fashioned manual, some letters lighter than others. It read:

Inside there's someone more eager to see you with every meeting since your recent first. Such affinities of the soul do exist, even in these crowded and cynical days. Be aware that a heart will be yours to take, if you discover you have a similarly inclined heart to give.

It took him three readings to make sure he'd translated the Geldmanese correctly. “So Daniel thought you were hot right off, and you could grab him anytime you wanted?”

Eddy took back her fortune. “Close enough.”

“Looks like whenever Mr. Geldman shoots, he scores.”

“I like Daniel a lot.”

“More than Joaquin and Greg?”

“Duh, yes.”

“Because they didn't like
Franny and Zooey
?”

“Maybe. Partly. We have a lot more things in common than one book, you know.”

“Like, other books.”

“More than that.”

“But he's afraid of water.”

Eddy snatched her can back so she could nail him again, this time on the head. Bad target choice, didn't hurt at all, and the can skittered across the floor, flinging tea drops she had to clean up. After tossing her wad of paper towels, she said, “People can get over phobias. But even if he doesn't, I'll still like him. I'll just do water stuff with you.”

“Good to know I'm useful.”

“You're not—?” Eddy stopped, for once defeated by a word.

And, for once, Sean wasn't. “Jealous?”

“I don't mean you-want-to-date-me jealous,” she said quickly.

“I don't mean that, either. Just, yeah, it would suck if you got so into somebody, you never hung out with me anymore.”

“That's not going to happen, Sean. Especially not with Daniel. He's your friend, too.”

“Right. So you guys can leave me out when you're messing around—”

“Thanks for the permission.”

“—and me and you can leave Daniel out when we're dealing with the window. Because, really, that's for his own good.”

“You're right. Keep the risk to ourselves.”

“Keep it to me. Remember, something happens and you have to tell, you didn't know about the window until
that minute
.”

“Well—”

“Come on, Eddy. What's the point of you losing the gig with Helen? If I get thrown out of the Order, I'll need you inside the MU Library to look up stuff in the
Necronomicon
for me. You know, the full Giles.”

“Giles? No way. I'm so Buffy.”

“Right. You're lucky if you make it to Xander.”

Now she went for
his
empty can. He hoisted both it and the half-full one over his head, and she had to settle for punching him in the ribs. A pulled punch, though, so Sean dumped only one glug of tea into her hair, fair all around.

 

13

The
next day Eddy informed Daniel that Sean knew about their new relationship. Mercifully she didn't say he'd caught them in a lip-lock, because Daniel was embarrassed enough without the graphic details. During a break in class, he admitted she was his first girlfriend. The accident, rehab, et cetera. “Dude,” Sean said. “You're ahead of me.” Which was the truth, considering that over the past three years he'd only made it to a second date twice and a third date once. Plus Geldman had never predicted romance for him. At least not in a fortune stuffed into a cardboard clamshell. At least not yet.

Soon Eddy and Daniel got comfortable enough around Sean to do some mild PDA, and he got comfortable enough not to mind it, so
that
was working out all right. Sean's trips into the seed world were working out all right, too. Eddy came up with a cover story in case Helen or some eerily nocturnal Order member wandered into the library while they were at it. Sean's dad had used this new putty while restoring the
Founding
windows, see, and he wanted Sean to check how well it was holding up, and she was there to hold Sean's ladder. They had to do it in the middle of the night because dumb-ass Sean had forgotten to check the putty earlier and he was supposed to call his dad first thing in the morning. And she was wearing a stethoscope because—

Well, she'd just have to hide the stethoscope if an intruder showed up. Why she actually needed it was to listen to what was going on in the seed world. Without it, she couldn't hear anything unless her ear was squashed to the glass, and even then the sound was muffled. A quick visit to a nursing supply store had solved the problem.

His early trips into the window, Sean kept his distance from Reverend Tyndale. Eddy had insisted he learn how far the seed world extended before inviting Orne back in. Though he grumbled for form's sake, it was fun to explore on the wing, and his adjustment to crow form grew shorter every merge. The first night, with no Orne to catch him, he plummeted to the ground. Eddy's panicked “Sean, Sean!” reverberated through the seed world like the shout of Goddess Almighty. Up on a second stepladder and casting a horizon-to-zenith shadow on the southern sky, she even looked like a goddess, and Sean lay in claws-up awe until he realized his apparent death was causing the divine ruckus. By then he was able to hop to his feet and take flight.

He discovered that unless he aimed for the exit point, he could fly without bounds in any direction. He first flew south, over future Kingsport Harbor, then inland over Indian villages scattered through otherwise solid forest. Flocks of birds loitered motionless in the air he plied. In a clearing, deer paused in mid-bound, and on a promontory, a bear stood guard over a sea in which stalled whales spouted fountains of ice. From two points farther south, he glimpsed smoke rising as if from clustered chimneys. One braided column had to rise from the Plymouth Colony, another from a baby Boston.

His next flight was along the wilder north coast. The third night he ventured into the forest, an animate cathedral with column trunks, vaulting branches, and sunset-edged leaves that formed a gilded ceiling over the dusky groves. Animals abounded except in the wedge of wood nearest Nyarlathotep. Maybe this wedge was the Master's particular chapel within the cathedral, for the only congregants were the crows and owls and whip-poor-wills that crowded every branch, gargoyle still. Lonely over being the only “living” creature in the seed world, he pecked some of the other birds. They never stirred. He pecked hardest at a crow perched above Nyarlathotep, as if ready to fill in for his missing minion. He couldn't rouse it or knock it off its branch, and Eddy yelled at him to stop—apparently she could see crow-Sean whenever he was in a part of the seed world represented in the
Founding
.

On the fourth night, under the condition he'd leave the window the second she rapped, Eddy agreed to let him call in Orne. Within a minute of his perching on Tyndale's shoulder, Orne arrived. The first thing he did was to take Sean on his wrist. The second was to discover Eddy's looming thunderhead of a shadow and the dark disk of her stethoscope hovering like a companion satellite below the crescent moon. When Sean had explained what the shadows meant, Orne spoke to her directly: “Miss Rosenbaum, or shall I call you Eddy, as I did when we chatted online?”

“Eddy,” she said shortly.

“Excellent. And I admire your ingenuity with the scope. It will let you join our conversations. I wish you could simply enter the seed world along with Sean, but that's impossible, as you're neither a paramagician nor a magician.”

The shadow shrugged. “I can still see and hear you, Reverend. If you try to snow Sean, I'm pulling him out of there.”

“Frank as ever. I'll endeavor to make pulling unnecessary.”

Eddy momentarily appeased, Orne sat on his favorite boulder at the edge of the woods. Sean retook his perch in the twisted pine. “Paramagicians,” he said. “So you mean Professor Marvell could get in here?”

“Only if you invited him.”

“That's not happening. I wish I could bring Helen, though. It'd be nice to have someone along.”

“I thought you might feel that way. It's why I made another avatar construct. Have you noticed the crow perched just above the Master's head?”

“Um, yeah.” Noticed and pecked the hell out of it.

“That's the second avatar. If you find another magician you want to introduce to the seed world, have him or her hold on to any part of your body while you enter. Then, when your avatar touches that particular crow, your guest will transfer into it. To be dismissed, as I am, by the trigger word.”

Nevermore,
Sean was almost stupid enough to say aloud. Almost. “I'd have to really trust that person.”

“Obviously.”

Daniel was the only one who came to mind, and Daniel was as much out of the running as Helen, given they'd decided not even to tell him about the seed world. “I doubt I'll use the second avatar anytime soon.”

“Don't worry. There's no expiration date.”

Sean changed the subject to his now-forbidden struggles with practical magic. Orne was especially interested in his access metaphor. “You bring me back to my first essays. Lightning was also my guide into magic.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, but you have the advantage of understanding the nature of electricity, as I didn't in those days. I hope you've toned down your metaphor? Lightning's a powerful image!”

“I've got it down to tiny threads of lightning, like spider silk, coming from everywhere. I couldn't grab the threads, though, so I thought, what about a lightning rod?”

“What havoc came of that?”

The heavenly rumble was Eddy snorting.

Sean told the story of the vaporized pencil and the meeting in Marvell's office. He'd expected Orne to condemn Marvell for once again oppressing magical youth. Instead Orne shook his head. “I don't often agree with the professor, but in this case, he's right.”

Sean almost did a 360 around his branch.

“Why so amazed?” Orne said. “I'm sure Daniel meant well, but how can he safely teach what he's just begun to learn?”

Was Eddy going to defend her boyfriend or what? Not a rumble out of her, so it was all on Sean. “Right, but he wasn't stupid. He warned me to go easy.”

“Did he know how to gauge the energy you accessed or how to help you create safe images in the first place?”

“He tried.”

“This is a situation where trying isn't enough. You see that, don't you?”

In fact, staring down into the concern in Orne's eyes, Sean did see it. “So I shouldn't try to do magic until I have a real mentor. Like Marvell said.”

“You're doing magic by being here in the seed world, but it's safe because an experienced magician designed the mechanism, and the mechanism itself supplies the energy for your transitions.”

“Does that make
you
my mentor?”

“No, only a friend like Daniel, trying to help you along until you're assigned a mentor, or choose one.” When Eddy moved restively but said nothing, Orne added: “I can offer you this world, and perhaps another key.”

“A key besides this crow?”

“Yes. Let's see if I can find one.” Orne walked over to the governor, who stood untroubled while God-fearing Reverend Tyndale rifled his pockets like an expert wallet snatcher. What Orne came up with wasn't a wallet but a long-barreled antique key with brass curlicues for a top.

Sean flew to the arm hefting the massive key. “What's it open?”

“That's irrelevant. The important thing is you could use the image of a key to collect energy in a controlled fashion. Benjamin Franklin himself realized that trying to capture electricity with rods was too dangerous, so he's supposed to have tried a key instead.”

“Tied to a kite!”

“You shouldn't need the kite. Imagine you're holding the key so only the tip of the bow is exposed.” Orne demonstrated, leaving nothing visible above his fist but the little brass knob that topped the curlicues. “At the same time imagine your hand's a perfect insulator. Only what you expose of the key will collect energy, which you can then harvest with your free hand.”

“Getting just a tiny bit of magic?”

“About enough to spin a pencil, as you meant to do.”

“And the more key I poke out, the more magic I grab.”

“You'd experiment.” Curlicue by curlicue, Orne exposed the bow of his key. “Slowly, cautiously. Remember, this is a
thought
experiment for now, conceptualizing your tools for the future.”