Someplace to Be Flying (33 page)

“Yeah, right.”

The oddest thing about all of this, Kerry realized, was that she was dealing with the situation instead of dissolving into a panic attack, the way she’d nor mally react to something this stressful.

“I don’t even know who you are and you expect me to—”

“That’s Ray,” Maida said.

Kerry turned to look at her. The crow girl seemed different. Taller, perhaps Her features sharper. Her usual good humor swallowed by a great stillness.

“You know him?” she said.

Maida nodded. “He’s your grandfather.”

“My …”

“But don’t get your hopes up,” the crow girl went on. “It’s not likely he’s here for a family reunion. Whenever he’s sniffing around, Cody’s not far be hind, and that only means trouble.”

“You stay out of this,” Ray told her.

The smile Maida gave him in return was sweet and dangerous and utterly out of keeping with what Kerry thought she knew of the girl’s character.

“Or what?” Maida said, her voice deceptively soft.

At that moment Zia dropped from the trees to land on the hood of Ray’s car. She, too, seemed changed. She radiated confidence and danger as she perched there, sitting on her heels.

“Mmm, what?” she asked.

There were undercurrents of tension present that Kerry couldn’t begin to fathom. She sensed history lying between the crow girls and the red-haired man, not entirely based on animosity, but a lack of trust was definitely involved.

“Will somebody explain what’s going on here?” she asked.

“I’m not with Cody on this one,” Ray said.

That made the crow girls laugh.

“Who’s Cody?” Kerry tried, but no one was paying attention to her.

Ray sighed. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this,” he said and reached under his jacket.

Rory knew he should have been working on the Tender Hearts earring order, but he’d gotten sidetracked by a dream he’d had that morning of Kerry sleeping in the backseat of a junked car, a fox curled up beside her, an enormous blackbird perched on the top of the seat behind her head. The residual memory of the dream put a design combining the two animals into his head that was too fascinating to ignore, a tangle of feather and fur, sharp beak and pointy fox muzzle. He wasn’t sure if he wanted it to be a pendant or a matched set of earrings. It would work cither way.

He sat at his kitchen table, sketching the various possibilities, music from a C
D
he’d borrowed from Annie coming from the speakers atop his cupboards. The group was called Afro Celt Sound System. An apt name, he decided as he listened to its blend of African and Celtic musicians playing their traditional instruments over a bed of trance dance-music rhythms. It was during a break between cuts that he heard the sharp rapping at his door.

Speak of the devil, he thought as he got up to answer it.

It had to be Kerry because neither Annie nor the crow girls ever bothered to knock.

“I had the weirdest dream about you last night,” he started to say as he opened the door to the smell of anise.

His voice trailed off when he found Chloë’ standing in the hall. Tall, dark-eyed, the fountain of her hair only barely contained with a black ribbon. It wasn’t always easy to reconcile the schoolmistress figure she cut at such close proximity? with the woman who could so often be seen perched on the peak of the house.

“Did you now,” she said, a trace of amusement in her voice.

Rory flushed. “I thought you were somebody else,” he told her, almost mumbling. He stood a little straighter and cleared his throat. “Do you want to come in? I’ve got coffee on.”

He made the invitation out of habit. In the nine years he’d lived here, Chloë had never been farther into the apartment than the front hall. But she surprised him this morning.

“Coffee would be pleasant,” she said.

He stood aside and she stepped by him, trailing her anise. Rory was never sure if it was a perfume, or if that was simply the way she smelled. Following her into the kitchen, he cleared some space at the table and then poured her a coffee while she sat down.

There was an embarrassing moment of silence that seemed to stretch on for far too long. Rory felt he should say something, but his mind had never been more blank than it was at the moment. He couldn’t have been more surprised to have her sitting here than if it had been Brandon knocking on his door this morning. Brandon, who barely seemed to register that there was anything in the world besides music.

“So,” he began and immediately regretted speaking since “so” was about as far as he could take the thought.

Chloë smiled. “Yes, this is a bit awkward, isn’t it?

“Not at all,” Rory said, but then gave up. “Well, a bit. We’ve never really talked much.”

“It’s not your doing. I’ve gotten far too spare with words in the last few years—at least so Annie says.”

“I wouldn’t—”

“So I’ll come straight to the point and spare both of us any further inconvenience. Do you remember, I believe it was this spring, when I asked you to clean out the attic?”

Did he? Even with Annie’s and Lily’s help, it had still taken them the better part of two days, but what a garage sale they’d had. Better yet, Chloë had let them split the proceeds three ways. Life had been good that month.

“Sure,” he said, wondering where she was going with this. He hoped she wasn’t looked for a cut of the profits at this late a date.

“I’ve been looking for an object that I believe might have inadvertently found its way into one of the boxes you removed. A small black tin, about so large.” She indicated a shape about the size of a small hardcover book. “It was filled with small black pebbles. Do you remember it?”

Rory nodded. “I’ve still got the pebbles—well, most of them. I tried cutting a couple to set in a bracelet, but it didn’t work out.”

She leaned forward, obviously interested. “What happened?”

“It was the weirdest thing. As soon as I started to cut them, they just turned to powder. But the stones are so hard you can bounce them off the sidewalk and they won’t break. They don’t even get marked. It doesn’t make any sense. I keep meaning to bring them around to this lapidarian I know to see if she can identify them, but I never seem to get around to it. What kind of stone are they?”

“I don’t believe I know the proper name.”

Just that. Not, I’ve heard them called this or that.

“Look,” Rory said. “I’m sorry about this. I had no idea you still wanted them.”

“Not to worry.”

“Because I still have the rest of them.”

“The stones aren’t my concern,” she said. “It was the tin in which they were stored that I was hoping to retrieve. Do you still have it?”

Rory shook his head.

“Do you know where it might be?”

He closed his eyes, trying to picture the tin.

“It wasn’t much,” he said. “Old and pretty battered, right?”

She nodded. “But of great … sentimental value.”

“Sure. I know the feeling. But I don’t—no, wait a minute. I think Kit has it. Or at least she took it. She was going to use it in her camera bag to hold her film canisters.”

“Kit?”

Rory laughed. “Oh, sorry. I mean, Lily—Lily Carson. I started calling her Kit for a joke one day—you know, as in Kit Carson—and it kind of stuck.”

“I see.”

Though it was pretty obvious to Rory that she didn’t really. Or if she did, she didn’t think it was all that funny.

“Do you want me to see if she’s still got it?” he asked.

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all. She’s out of town for the long weekend, but I’ll give her a call tomorrow.”

“I would really appreciate it.” She looked as if she were about to rise from the table, but she put a finger on one of his sketches, a stylistic intertwining of a fox head with the head and wings of a crow. “This is an interesting design. What made you think of it?”

“Remember I was talking about a dream when you came to the door?”

Amusement touched her lips again.

“Well, I had this dream of Kerry last night. She was sleeping in this junked-out old car, see, and there was a fox and some kind of blackbird—a crow or a raven—sort of watching over her, like protectors. Or maybe like totems. Anyway, when I woke up, I couldn’t get this image out of my head so I’ve been playing with it ever since.”

Chloë was nodding as he spoke. “Do you often dream of people you know being accompanied by some sort of animal companion?”

“Not really. But everybody’s got an affinity to some animal or other, don’t you think? And I guess I tend to pick up on that sometimes. Especially when I’m doing commissions. It’s one of the first things I ask, because I prefer to deal with images from the natural world than with pure design. You know, birds, animals, trees, flowers.” He paused and smiled. “I guess I’m going on a little.”

“No,” Chloë said. “I find it very interesting.” But she glanced at her watch. “However, I do have a few things I must still attend to today.”

“Oh, sure. I understand. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve talked to Lily.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.”

She stood up and Rory followed her to the hallway where another awkward silence fell between them. Rory was about to just say good-bye and make his retreat when he glanced out the door. Chloë‘s gaze followed his.

Not quite able to believe what he was seeing—this was Stanton Street, after all, in the heart of Lower Crowsea—Rory watched a tall, red-haired stranger standing on their walk pull a handgun out from under his sports jacket. He felt Chloë tense beside him.

“Damn him for meddling,” she muttered, then started for the porch.

Ray hadn’t wanted it to play out this way, but the presence of the crow girls left him no choice. Logic had no place in their lexicon, or if it did, it traveled its own road through their twisty thinking. There was no reasoning with them—never had been.

“Let’s everybody just take it easy,” he said.

From under his jacket he pulled his own .45—the one he should have put to the back of Cody’s head instead of trying to settle things without weapons. His didn’t have pearl handles, but the barrel was as long, and he held it as steadily as Cody had held his.

“I know this looks bad,” he said, addressing Kerry, “but I swear to you, I won’t hurt you. Only you have to get in the car.”

There was a whisper of movement at his back and he stepped quickly to one-side to where he could keep an eye on them all—crow girls and Kerry. Zia was now halfway between her perch on the hood of his rental and where he was standing, casually cleaning her nails with the point of a switchblade. She raised her eyebrows as the muzzle of his .45 swung in her direction. Maida hadn’t moved, but she watched him intently, eyes narrowed to slits.

Jack was always telling him stories about how serious they could be, but Ray had never put much store in the idea before. He’d always thought of them as a couple of kids—cute, relatively harmless. But looking at them now—the economy of their stillness, their watchfulness—he found himself thinking that maybe they really were as old and dangerous as Raven.

He really didn’t need this. And neither did Kerry, not if the sudden pallor of her complexion was anything to go by. She looked like she was about to faint.

“It’s okay,” he began, hoping to reassure her. “Really. But we don’t have a whole lot of time and …”

His voice trailed off. From the corner of his eye he caught movement on the porch and then Chloë’ was there, accompanied by the young man who rented the downstairs apartment. Ray sighed. He’d really wanted to avoid any complications, but this was getting worse by the minute.

“Hey, Chloë,” he said. “Brandon,” he added as the tall black man came around the corner of the house. “Been awhile.”

Damn crows. He hadn’t heard a warning caw, but something had called them together. Annie was sitting up on the roof of the porch, now, looking down at him. It took him a moment to recognize her, with her hair cut short and dyed so blonde. He couldn’t spot the Aunts, but they were probably close by, too. In the trees, maybe, wearing feathered skins. He could hear something rustling up above.

“The child has been under our protection since the day she was born,” Chloë told him.

“And you’ve been doing a great job of it, from what I’ve been hearing.”

That touched a nerve, he thought as Chloë frowned. Fair enough. They weren’t exactly making this easy on him either.

“We all make mistakes,” Chloë said. “But I’ve been trying to make up for mine—with better success than Cody has his, I might add.”

“I told your girls here, Cody didn’t send me.”

“No?”

Chloë was doing all the talking. The rest of them simply watched him from their various vantage points, letting her take the lead.

“Truth is,” Ray said, “we’ve had a falling out—over the girl. I’m not agreeable to his having put her in the line of fire.” He let them chew on that for a moment, before adding, “You do know he’s brought the cuckoos in on this, don’t you? Three, four families—including your old friends, the Morgans.”

“Shit,” Chloë said.

That was better, a crack in the ladylike demeanor to make her a little more !ike the Chloë he’d known in the old days.

“Oh, yeah,” Ray told her. “We’re talking fierce times coming. You sure you want Kerry to have to deal with the hurt they can bring down?”

“We can protect her.”

“What? With this bunch?”

Brandon took a step toward him and Annie slid down from the roof of the porch to land softly on the grass, knees absorbing the impact. But Chloë waved them both back.

“You’d better leave,” she said.

“I’m not conning you. I’m here to help.”

Chloë shook her head. “We can’t take that chance.”

“I’m telling you that if you don’t—”

“Don’t make me raise my voice,” Chloë told him. “You wouldn’t want to wake Raven and have him become involved.”

“Raven’s too far gone for anybody to wake him now,” Ray said, though he didn’t feel nearly as confident about that as he hoped he sounded.

He turned his attention to Kerry. She seemed to be coming around. Her back was a little straighter and she didn’t look so faint. Chin up, gaze meeting his. Trying to look determined but obviously completely in the dark as to what was going on here. No surprise there. Except for Jack, the crows always played their cards close to the vest.