The Thief (9 page)

“
I’m with Gabriel,” Camille
stated.

“
At present, it seems
that
Gabriel
wishes you to be with us,” she bit off his name. “So. Tell me
the days of the week.” Her eyebrow arched in challenge.

What? Huh? Right now?
Uh...
“Monday, Tuesday...” Camille’s brain
twisted. “Thursday...”

Her lip twisted in distaste. “Remedial
English,” Umino decreed. “If you can’t handle conversational
English by the end of the semester, you’re out. I don’t care who
your guardian is, we have standards to uphold. Also, you will only
speak English on this campus, from here on out.” She passed Camille
a sheet of paper.

Camille gazed up at her in horror.

“
Immersion is the best
teacher,” she said dryly. “Perform, or I will send you to public,
and all your darling mentor’s efforts will have been wasted. Public
has no idea what to do with someone like you.”

“
Someone like
me?”

“
Surely it’s obvious,” Umino
said. “We’re the only ones qualified to educate
monsters.”

Camille stood abruptly, chair scraping.

“
Don’t be so dramatic,” she
observed, unimpressed, “or I’ll put you in theatre too.”

Gabriel picked her up outside the school,
the powder-blue junker idling loudly. Mostly powder-blue - one of
the doors was white. He would have been easy to spot even if he
wasn’t the only one waiting up front. A couple of cars were parked
in the back of the school lot - she assumed it was teachers staying
late.

She slid into the passenger seat, letting
her bag hit the floor and the door slam shut in one fluid motion.
She didn’t even want to look at him right now. This was all his
doing.

“
I’ve never picked a kid up
from their first day of school before,” he said, in his oblivious
way. “I think you’re supposed to tell me all about your day. Tell
me you made lots of friends and a cute boy asked you out and your
idiot English teacher gave you too much homework.”

At least now she could speak her own
language. “I am not going back in there,” she stated flatly, back
to Japanese at last.

He sighed, putting the car in gear. “No,
see, that’s not how it works. Talk about how you traded food with
other kids in the cafeteria.”

“
What am I, seven? And who
cares about cafeteria food?”

“
Well I do. If they’re not
feeding you properly, I’ll have to put in a complaint with the
school board. Wait, do I need to join a PTA now or something? Does
Havenwood have a PTA...?” he mused.

“
You are ignoring me,”
Camille fumed.

“
I’m distracting you.
There’s a difference.”

“
Either way you’re not
listening. I don’t want anything to do with the other students.
They’re either completely oblivious, or they’re tools of the
principal. Sheep and wolves.”

Gabriel’s expression sobered at her
metaphor. The light ahead changed to yellow, then red. The car
slowed and came to a stop at the intersection.

“
She called me a monster,”
Camille said.

Gabriel took a slow breath and ran his hands
through his fine, jet-black hair, looking up at the stoplight.
“Damn. Already?”

“
She wants me
gone.”

“
Ohhhh no, kiddo. Not in the
slightest. Very much the opposite. She knows what her family would
do to her if she let us get away. She may not like us, but by no
means does she want to be rid of us.” He paused for a moment, and
then a grin spread slowly across his face. That was the smile that
meant they were about to do something dangerous, something outside
the box, and it almost made her grin as well. He was a very
difficult person to stay angry with.

“
You know what would drive
her crazy?” he said, as the light changed and the car inched back
into motion.

“
No,” she said, trying to
maintain a solemn expression.

His eyes flicked to her and back to the
road; they were glittering. “If you did really well.”

“
Be serious.”

“
That is what she’d hate,”
he said emphatically. “Rin Umino’s idea of power is thinking that
she and her pet students are better than everyone else. I’m a
little...ah...notorious...in their circles. That makes you
notorious by association. If you really want to stick it to
her...follow the rules and destroy them doing it.”

“
We’re destroying
them?”

“
Metaphorically.”

“
Less
interested.”

“
Come on, it can’t have been
that bad.”

“
She called me a monster.
One of her ‘pets’ tried to interrogate me about the bracer. My
notebook is soaking wet. They’re making me take extra English
classes, they won’t let me speak Japanese,” she said, and then
added. “And no one talked to me.” That last was a lie, she realized
as soon as she said it. Jul had tried. Several times. She frowned
in recollection.

“
That’s more like it,” he
said. “First day of school stuff. Then I say things like, tomorrow
will be better, and that maybe you should try talking to other
people if they’re not talking to you first, and we can fix your
notebook with a hairdryer. Wait, do we have a hairdryer? Honestly,
extra English sounds like the worst part.”

“
Why is that?”

“
Because I know your English
teacher,” he said, distracted as they pulled into the parking lot
of the cafe, noting two cars there.

“
Who’s that?” Camille
asked.

“
I was hoping you could tell
me,” he said, bringing the car to a quiet stop. He rolled down the
windows and turned off the engine. “Can you hear them?”

She concentrated. She could hear the wasp
buzzing around the back of the car. The engine cooling down. The
wind in the trees across the lot. She closed her eyes. The heat
radiating off the shingles. The motorcycle two miles away. The two
people arguing inside the church/cafe. Her senses were unusually
dulled. She should have been able to hear them crisply from this
proximity, but instead she had to strain to pick out their
conversation. Voices new to her, but she could place them.

“
You don’t need to be here
for this,” a man was saying.

“
You’re going to try to run
him off, and I’m not going to let you do that again,” a woman
replied.

“
You think I had anything to
do with the last time? You’re fooling yourself.”

“
It’s Tailor and Miller,”
Camille murmured. She could almost smell them, underneath the harsh
exhaust smell that permeated the parking lot, and the fragrance of
shaved wood and fresh paint that flowed out of the main door.
Tailor smelled like old books, coffee, and iron. Miller smelled
like oranges and acetone.

“
You’d do anything to get
rid of him, John. For the hundredth time, I’m not
stupid.”

“
And for the thousandth
time, Charlotte, I’m flattered you think I have any influence over
that walking disaster,” Tailor snapped. “Gabriel left because he
was done with us, not for any other reason. Not you, not me, not
Simon or Kyra. He was bored, so he left.”

“
They, ah, they’re...”
Camille filed the comment away. “They’re having an argument. About
you. Tailor said you’re...a walking disaster?”

“
From his perspective, I’m
sure I am,” he said coolly. “I guessed it would be them, I just
wanted to be sure.”

“
I can’t hear them very
well,” Camille admitted. “Can something interfere with
that?”

“
Hmm,” Gabriel remarked.
“Call it...one of the side effects of this town. I just wasn’t sure
how strongly it would affect you. Well, let’s not keep them
waiting.” He exited the car, slamming the door shut loudly. Camille
heard the conversation inside cease. She gathered her bag and
climbed out of the car as well.

“
They’re going to ask you to
leave,” Gabriel said lowly, as they approached the door. “You can
protest if you like, but do it. You should be able to hear
everything from your room anyway, if you care.”

“
Why wouldn’t I care?”
Camille grumbled, and he patted her head.

Their feet crunched in the gravel as they
approached the door. Gabriel opened it, and looked convincingly
surprised. “I wondered who would ambush me in my own space, but I
suppose I should have expected,” he said.

“
No one’s ambushing,”
Charlotte said.

Tailor’s expression was sour. He regarded
Gabriel with the sort of vitriol Camille chalked up to words like
‘arch enemy’ and ‘nemesis.’

“
I appreciate the thought,
Charlotte, but John and I are both adults now. I believe we can be
civil.”

“
Yeah, well, I don’t,” she
stated. “Camille, I’m very sorry to ask this, would you mind going
upstairs? This is some very old, very boring grownup
stuff.”

That was a lie, and a poor one at that,
Camille noted. Charlotte Miller was weak at deception.

“
It’s alright, kiddo, this
won’t take long,” Gabriel said, offhand.

“
Whatever,” she muttered, in
English. Camille climbed the steps, feeling superior. She and
Gabriel could outsmart anyone. She shut the door to her room with
an audible click, but she wasn’t inside. With her diminished
hearing, she wouldn’t take any chances; she wasn’t missing this for
anything. She stood in the hall, waiting for the conversation to
trickle up the stairs. Eyes closed, she listened with ears
perked.

She heard a huff of breath. Frustration.
Tailor.

“
If you wanted to talk to me
alone,” Gabriel said, “have the sense to do it when Charlotte can’t
follow you so easily.”

“
How dare you come back
here,” Tailor seethed.

“
How dare I?” Gabriel copied
lightly. “Such a dramatic turn of phrase. How dare I. Sounds like
Shakespeare. I’m not sure we’re quite on that level
yet.”

“
We’re well past that level,
old man.”

Old man?
Camille frowned. They looked the same
age.

“
Keep blaming me all you
like, I don’t care,” Gabriel said calmly. “The reason I’m here has
nothing to do with you. It didn’t before, and it doesn’t
now.”

“
And I suppose you’re just
here for the excellent school system, now that you’re a responsible
parent?” Tailor bit off. “What on earth are you doing with that
poor girl? Rin Umino will eat her alive. Is that why you brought
her here? You’re bored with her, and decided it was time to get rid
of her?”

Camille’s blood pounded in her veins. She
wanted to vault over the stairs and kick Tailor right in the face.
Gabriel would never do that. He knew nothing.

“
She has to get into the
world sometime,” Gabriel stated. “Maybe I waited a little too long,
but I’m selfish that way. You want to attack me, Tailor? Why
are
you
still
here? I seem to recall you swearing to get out of Havenwood the
first chance you got.”

A beat of silence. Camille assumed Tailor
was faltering at the sudden turnaround. “That’s none of your
business,” the English teacher said lowly.

“
What did the Uminos promise
you?” Gabriel asked. “What could possibly have kept you
here?”

“
Gabriel, please,” Charlotte
intervened. “That’s enough.”

Silence again. Camille imagined Tailor
glaring at her guardian. She anticipated Gabriel’s expression -
infuriatingly pleasant and unruffled.

“
You want to know what I’m
up to,” Gabriel said coolly. “You came to ask me what it was, even
though you assumed I wouldn’t tell you. If I was secretive, you
would be justified in distrusting me. I have bad news for you,
Tailor. Times have changed, and my plans are really very simple. I
want Camille to graduate high school, grow up, and do whatever she
wants until she’s quite old. That’s the plan. Camille is going to
survive all of you, no matter what happens. Right now that means
walking into that school and handling whatever you, or Rin Umino,
or anyone else dishes out to her. That girl can outlast the gods if
she puts her mind to it.”

Camille’s eyes widened. What on earth was he
talking about? Outlast the gods?

“
You’re really going to
claim that all of this is about her? And expect me to believe
it?”

“
I won’t say I expect you to
believe it, but yes.”

Guilt panged in Camille’s chest. She had
been selfish. She hadn’t realized all the trouble Gabriel was going
to, all for her.

“
Fine,” Tailor said. “Then I
only have one question. Where is the sword?”

“
Hmm?”

“
Don’t play stupid with me!”
Tailor shouted. “My father’s sword vanished the night you did. What
did you do with it?”

Gabriel sighed. “Some things really are just
coincidence. I had nothing to do with that.”

More silence.

“
You may be set on staying,”
Tailor said lowly, “and I can’t stop you. But don’t expect to be
welcomed. Everyone still remembers the county fair.”

“
Oh, do they still hold that
every year?” Gabriel asked lightly.

There was the scuffling sound of shoes on
the tile. “John don’t!” Charlotte snapped.