Third Solstice CALIBRE with cover (4 page)

Lee set the teapot down on the surface with a bang. “Gideon Tyack-Frayne,” he declared. “I love you more than life, but if you say
did not
, I’m divorcing you.”

“I wasn’t. I—”

“Yeah, you were. And then Zeke was gonna say
did too
, and we were all about to find out what it would’ve been like in your nursery class if you’d been kids at the same time.” He grabbed a couple of mugs out of a cupboard. “Whatever it is, the pair of you put a sock in it until I can pour this tea and get out of your hair. Okay?”

A vibrant silence descended. Tamsyn, briefly ignored, gave a mewling cry and began to wave her hands in the air.

She loved Ezekiel. Part of her delight in him was his solemnity, which she strove on all occasions to crack, pinging the lid on her jack-in-the-box to make him jump, rolling her spring-loaded walker at him from unexpected doorways. Despite this, or maybe because of it, he adored her in his turn. His arrival usually meant playtime, a walk on the moors or a visit to the village park. Instead Lee had carried her away from her friend and imprisoned her. If Gideon had been paying proper attention, he’d have recognised the shift in her gesticulations, the new focus. He’d have listened to the throb in the base of his skull.

Her pompom ball, a fantastical creation knitted for her by Ma Frayne, rose into the air. It had been missing for a couple of days. Isolde must have taken a fancy to it and carried it off to her basket. Gideon opened his mouth in warning—of what, he had no idea—but it was too late. Tamsyn raised her hand like Andy Murray about to fire a good one over the net.

The ball hit Zeke square on the back of the skull. “Oh—Jesus,” Gideon said helplessly, and clapped his hands to his mouth. “Tamsyn!”

It wasn’t funny. The situation was horrendous, and Gideon had almost lost track of which of the two women—Elowen or Eleanor—his brother was talking about. Either way, something difficult, painful and sensitive was going down. He couldn’t possibly laugh.

But Lee’s face was such a picture. His eyes were wide in consternation. And he was about to hurl himself under the bus for his child. “Zeke!” he gasped. “I am... so, so sorry. I meant to throw that for Isolde. I can’t think how I missed.”

Zeke turned round. He looked more puzzled than anything else. The ball had impacted softly, and he was used to a certain amount of chaos in his brother-in-law’s home. “That’s quite all right,” he said. “By the way, Lee, I didn’t mean to imply that you would ever deliberately overhear anything I said, or—or thought. I just...”

He fell silent. On the floor, the pompom ball was twitching like a live thing. Tamsyn’s brow rucked as she strove to get a grip on it, showing it what it was meant to do with small upward jerks of her palm. Slowly, gracefully, the ball rose into the air.

This time she delivered it without fuss. Zeke sat open-mouthed as it floated across the room towards him. Any hope that he might not know who was doing this died as his attention fixed on Tamsyn. The ball came to a hovering halt above his lap, and he scrambled out from under it, knocking over his chair. “No. No.”

“Zeke, take it easy.”

“Your child is doing this. Keep it away from me.”

Did he mean the ball or the child? Gideon’s sickening doubt immediately transferred itself to Tamsyn. She let the ball drop with a splash into Isolde’s water dish. After a moment of blood-chilling silence, she released a desolate wail.

It had been five months since Gideon had seen her really upset. She was too little for the terrible twos he’d been warned about, and the worst he’d expected of those were tantrums in the supermarket—not for every loose item in his kitchen to lift from its moorings, like small boats on an incoming Falmouth tide, and begin a mid-air dance.

Cups, mugs, cookbooks. The toaster, tugging at the end of its cord. There was a wild humour to it, flashing Gideon back to Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice in
Fantasia
, but then the knives began to rattle in their block.

He got to his feet. He was an adult, a policeman and a householder, and more important than any of these things, he was husband to his white-faced other half and father to his child. He stepped through the chaos—swept Tamsyn out of her high chair with one arm and caught Lee into the other. “Stop it,” he commanded. Who did he expect to obey him? Ezekiel, maybe, to quit staring at the baby as if she’d been a snake. The forces of nature, raw and incomprehensible, to let go of their hold on his home. “Stop it now.”

The mugs dropped and shattered. The toaster crashed down on its side, several weeks of unattended crumbs spraying out across the surface. Tamsyn huddled like a woodlouse into his embrace. The static in the air cleared, leaving an ice-blade clarity, frost-bound fields round a church after the bells have stopped. Lee stepped forward into the hush. “Zeke,” he said carefully, holding out a hand. “She’s only a little girl.”

The sugar bowl had disgorged its contents in a widespread cloud. Blindly Zeke brushed the crystals from his jersey. “What... What did I just see?”

“We don’t know yet. She’s just started doing it. But it isn’t anything harmful, and—”

“Not
harmful
?” Zeke held out one shaking finger towards the knife block. “I have seen things—countenanced things—in your company and my brother’s, until I’ve begun to... doubt my own sanity, let alone my faith. I’ve even tried to help you. But this—this is...”

Gideon handed the baby to Lee. He came to stand squarely in front of his brother, arms folded. “Choose your words carefully.”

“You must know what they’re going to be.” Zeke’s voice was a ghost of itself, thin and attenuated with fear. “You know who I am. You know what I do. And this is... devil’s work, Gideon. You have a demon in your home.”

“A
demon
?”

“Bring the child to my church. I’ll do what I can for her.”

“An actual
demon
, Ezekiel?”

“You heard me.”

“Yes, I did. Get out.”

Lee stepped between them. “Don’t. He’s just scared.”

“He’s not. He thinks he’s got the right to come in here and drag off our child to whatever medieval bloody exorcism he imagines is gonna—what, Zeke? Cast out the devil from her?”

“Not a right. My duty.”

“Fine, Matthew Hopkins. Don’t let the door bang your arse on the way out.”

Chapter Four

The night had made good on its promise of frost. Gideon only realised this when he stood up from the rail and found the cotton of his pyjamas sticking to the wrought iron. His motives for following Zeke outside had been complex. There had been the element of seeing him off the premises, making sure every trace of him was gone. He shivered, rubbing his arms. The village was small this morning, the moor rising silent and vast as the sky beyond the furthermost rooftops. Sunlight on the ice-daubed crests only emphasised their loneliness. When Zeke’s tail lights had disappeared around the corner—and good riddance to him—loss had struck Gideon so sharply that he’d had to sit down.

He was freezing his butt to the rail. This was ridiculous. Carefully he detached himself and went inside. Tamsyn was crawling around in her playpen, chortling at things only she could see. The kettle was on again, and his kitchen and his morning were perfectly normal apart from the shattered crockery. Lee was sweeping up. Gideon grabbed a dustpan and brush and went to help him.

They worked in silence until every shard was gone. Gideon hoovered the sugar from around the table, Isolde snuffling at his heels. He set the toaster upright, checked that it was still working, and went to join Lee by the side of the pen. Together they stood and watched their daughter, who seemed to be putting on a display of ordinary babyhood for them, drooling and gnawing on a teething ring. After a moment she grinned and pointed at Gideon, as if assigning him to speak first. “You’re a troublemaker, you are,” he told her, resting his hands on the top bar of the pen.

“Oh,
she’s
a troublemaker?”

Reluctantly Gideon met Lee’s gaze. “I didn’t mean to throw him out of the house.” Lee’s eyebrows rose, and he reviewed his words and actions. “Okay. Yes, I did.”

“He’s lucky he doesn’t have the print of your size-ten on his backside.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Do you remember, a little while back—when I’d thought it was okay not to get our adoption papers formalised, and you disagreed?”

“Yeah. I remember that.”

“And I said afterwards that it was okay for you—nobody else, just you—to put your foot down with me?”

Gideon nodded miserably. He supposed it wasn’t okay all the time. That he could go too far, even for Lee. Despite their differences, Lee and Zeke had developed their own strong bond. “You heard what he said.”

“Yes. Sometimes you have to be boss. You were defending your family, and I’m grateful.”

Not as grateful as Gideon. He took a deep breath, oxygen and relief flaring. He put out an arm and Lee walked into it. “I see,” he said, holding him tight. “I can be boss, as long as it’s all right with you?”

“Something along those lines.”

“Do you see the irony of that?”

“Plainly. What are we going to do, Gid? He called her a demon. And that came from someone who loves her. Who loves
us
.”

“He’s a twat. He doesn’t love anybody.”

Lee led him back to the table. Neither of them quite wanted to sit down in the chair Zeke had knocked over in his wrath. Lee perched on the table edge, drawing Gideon to stand between his thighs. “That’s not true.”

“I know. But he was so terrified, or mind-blown, or whatever it was, that he forgot he loves her, and I was so pissed off with him that I never even found out why he came here in the first place.”

“He was worried about something.”

“Something to do with Eleanor. I thought he said Elowen and I nearly bloody died.” He rubbed his brow against Lee’s, feeling the rush and wash of his own fears reflected there, the margins of a storm-racked sea. “It’s going to be a problem, isn’t it—this new thing of Tamsyn’s?”

“Yes. I don’t think I’m being a fussy dad if I say that psychokinesis is not gonna help our kid integrate into society. We have to stop her.”

“How?”

“In so many ways she’s ordinary. And she’s just started doing this. Maybe we can stop her in the same way we would if she’d started doing anything else that was...” Lee’s voice roughened. “That was wrong.”

“You don’t think it’s wrong at all.”

“Nor do you, because she’s your baby and you can’t believe any harm of her. But she’s too little to control it, and even if she ever learns, she’ll terrify some people, and others—worst-case scenario—will want her strapped down in a military lab somewhere, being dissected for her weapons potential.”

“Fuck’s sake, love.”

“I said it was worst-case. Stop her, Gideon. Teach her not to, just like you taught her not to pull Isolde’s tail or crawl too near the fire. Don’t even think about it.”

Gideon straightened up. He let Lee go and went to crouch by the playpen. He
had
done those things, hadn’t he? They hadn’t been hard. He’d never questioned the necessity. The dog had a right to a peaceful life, and obviously his child, who was bright and cooperative, needed to learn not to burn herself. Tamsyn had taken these corrections in good part, as if she’d been able to look into her father’s mind and understand his intentions.

And that was a very good point. “Lee,” he said softly, not taking his eyes off the baby. “Why don’t you ever do the scoldings?”

“Scoldings?” Lee’s smile warmed his voice. “Is that what you call them?”

“Don’t avoid the question.”

“I was wondering when you’d notice. Which one of us gets called
Dada
around here?”

“Well—me, I suppose. But—”

“And she calls me Lee, as if she was my friend or my equal. In some ways that’s how she sees herself.”

Gideon fought back laughter. “I’d regret asking how she sees me, wouldn’t I?”

“No, you wouldn’t. She sees you as her dad. And part of that involves discipline.” Lee came and stood behind him, laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll never leave you alone with it, I promise, and things might change as she gets older. For now I’m more like a brother to her. We share too much of a wavelength for her to take me seriously.”

“All right. Telling her not to put food up her nose is one thing, though. How am I meant to stop her from levitating the furniture?”

“You know when she’s about to do it, don’t you?”

“Yes. I feel a kind of tugging in my head.”

“Well, your family’s as ancient and mixed up in old Cornish magic as mine. You’ve learned to see things and do things you never thought you could. If she tugs at you, can you... tug back, show her that this isn’t right?”

“I don’t know. I guess I could try.”

He stretched out a hand between the bars of the playpen. Tamsyn gave a gurgle of pleasure and crawled over. She grabbed his thumb in one fist and his little finger in the other. “Dada.”

“That’s right, sweet pie. Dada needs to tell you something.”

Words wouldn’t do it. He closed his eyes. Her clutch made it easy, opening up the channels between them he hadn’t dared acknowledge yet were there, because all he’d wanted to be was her father, the guy who went out to work and came back, who put a roof over her head and defended her from all the world’s ordinary badness. Fresh and bright in her memory he found the scene with Ezekiel. He saw the back of his brother’s skull, a lovely target, and there at last was the wondrous lost woollen ball. Disorientation swept him and he grabbed for the bars of the playpen with his free hand. He could lift the ball without touching it. His head throbbed with the knowledge of his power. He was one year old, practically everything he wanted hopelessly out of his reach, but now he could...

“No,” he said, right into the centre of her gift. He gathered it all up—the images, the temptation, the results, crushed them into nothing and made them go dark. “Tamsyn, no more. No.”

She let go of his hand. He surfaced from her strange waters, gasping. After a moment when he thought he might faint, he met and returned her wide, unblinking stare.