The Crone's Stone

though they’d collapse on contact. “They can’t be Fortescue’s, surely? I mean, I know he’s old, but … Why has he got all these gross weapons?”

  He looked over at me with a grimace. “Maybe he likes collecting torture stuff too?”

  The sitting room was far less fancy than the outer bedroom, with a well-worn leather recliner occupying a corner, a remote control on the armrest. There was an expensive high-tech stereo built into one wall devoted to an extensive collection of jazz and classical. I used the remote to click on the stereo and a song called ‘Danse Macabre’ by Camille Saint-Saëns lit the digital display.

  “Moving on.” Smith began to steer me from the room to the sounds of playful flute and lilting deep-throated cello.

  “Wait!” A lavishly carved buffet sat along a wall just inside the door leading to the outer area. Decanters cluttered its top, next to a silver tray and three delicate short-stemmed glasses. I popped the cork on one bottle and sniffed in the heady aroma of cinnamon and berries. It was strong stuff, my eyes watered. “I didn’t even know he drank.”

  “I could do with a stiff one right now.”

  We headed out towards Mrs Paget’s suite, and I grew more disappointed at myself with every step. “Smithy, how could I be so blind?” I said bitterly. “How could I live with people I love and have no clue about who they really are? I don’t feel like I know them at all.”

  He glanced at me with sympathy as we arrived at her entrance. “It’s usually a fairly standard modern attitude. We’re all so wrapped up in our own deals, we forget to really see anything else.” Smithy stepped closer and draped an arm across my shoulder to give me an affectionate squeeze. “Or pay attention to anyone except ourselves. But in your case?” He shook his head, reaching to push open the door. “Who’d ever believe you live in a den of aging assassins? Let alone the other stuff. Don’t blame yourself for trying to hang on as tight as possible to normal, Bear. Shall we?”

  I sighed. The adrenalin of Seth’s appearance had faded and I began to question if it had really happened at all. All this rushing about seemed silly when the real issue was how to help Bea and Fortescue and Mrs Paget. Surely, there was some way to fix their condition.

  “Do we have to, Smith? Seth’s assault on the warehouse seems fairly sluggish. I need to read that diary and see if there’s a way to stop my guardians’ accelerated aging.”

  “Reading can wait until we’re in the safe room.” His sympathy evaporated. “That douche is lulling you into a false sense of security before he pounces. Now, stop procrastinating and help me find a gun.”

  Douche? Smith’s vehemence seemed out of proportion to what we knew of Seth. Did he somehow understand what Seth could do to me from afar? The shame amplified. And we were back to guns.

  “Silly,” I mumbled. “Can you even kill … whatever he is with a gun?”

  “No idea. I’m improvising,” he said in a strange tone that immediately grabbed my attention. I followed his gaze over the room from the threshold.

  The refined, flowery decor of Laura Ashley celebrated Mrs Paget’s green thumb: wallpaper, bedspread, cushions, curtains, all dotted with tiny pastel blooms in rainbow colours. The room was jammed with beautiful orchids, a hothouse of perfume and vibrancy. But that was not what had him stunned.

  I cautiously pushed further inside, following his gaze. Lining the walls or propped on shelves were glass-fronted, fat frames containing dried plants, seeds and beans, all neatly labelled in tiny handwriting.

  “Mrs Paget favours poisons,” he said.

  “Poisons?” I frowned. “How do you know they’re not exotic food ingredients? Mrs Paget loves to cook.”

  “Oh, they’re exotic all right. But it would be better to go hungry if she made you something with this lot. Take that one.” He pointed to the picture-box over my right shoulder where globes of tiny, white stellate flowers were pressed on black paper.

  “Pretty. Looks innocent enough.”

  He made his ‘oh really’ face, which meant I was about to seem very dumb. “Hemlock. Coniine extracted from that species was used to execute Socrates.”

  “Ahh,” I nodded for want of a better response. “Well, it’s still pretty. I suppose death by toxin’s not worse than Fortescue’s preference for dismemberment.”

  Smithy made a funny little choking sound. Recipes of a far more lethal type than I was used to cooking with Mrs Paget were scrawled in white crayon next to their preserved source. I listed them out loud, moving from one to the next along the wall over her dresser.

  “Oxalic acid from boiled rhubarb leaves. Five kilograms of leaves yields twenty-five grams to cause death. Remind me to steer clear of her rhubarb pie. Atropine from belladonna, colchicine from the meadow saffron.”

  Tucked next to the macabre display, she had degrees in Biochemistry, Computer Engineering and Medicine. Like Fortescue, she had a lounge off her main bedroom. It was set up as a study with a state-of-the-art network of computer towers.

  “They have their own internet hub,” Smithy said. On the other side of the room now, he inspected shelves of powders, crystals and colourful liquids in catalogued jars or stoppered bottles, no doubt waiting patiently until the release of their deadly secrets.

  “It would be easy to conceal their digital signal across the web,” I said.

  He cleared his throat. “Do you know, if you combine nitric and sulphuric acids with glycerine, it makes nitro-glycerine? A very unstable explosive.” Smithy perused labels. “And that nitre, sulphur and naphtha were used to make Greek fire in the seventh century? It’s so flammable, anything it touches goes up nearly instantly.”

  “No. More to the point, how do you know?”

  He squatted to search under Mrs Paget’s bed, his reply slightly muffled by the thick quilt. “I’m useless at chemistry, except for bronze casting. In senior Science I was responsible for two explosions and the Hazmat boys had to evacuate the building so many times when I attended we were on a first-name basis.” His head popped up over the side and then the rest of him. “A call-out to my high school became known as a Code Vegas. I can also name Bea’s gun and the calibre bullets it uses.”

  I stared at him. “They don’t teach that at art school.”

  “Billie,” he said. “Everything she ever learned about combat or weapons filtered into my brain as soon as she died. Like a Matrix download. Poisons too.”

  Smithy had acquired unpractised talents, similar to my own sudden aptitude with ancient languages. Mrs Paget’s genius on the other hand, was well evolved.

  Our gaze held across her pretty, killer room. “Anything else I don’t want to know, but should?”

  “Just that I have a very bad feeling, one that’s getting worse every minute. It looks as if Bea’s the boss of weapons invented after the Dark Ages. Come on. I need to get you to safety.”

  A snide voice in my brain asked safety from whom? My minders were as dangerous, if not more so, than any of the strangers they’d warned me about when I was a little girl.

  Twenty

  I lagged Smith as we looped back around to my wing of the warehouse, past the kitchen, a right turn by my room and the study and then on to Aunt Bea’s in the front corner for more unpleasant revelations. For once, I yearned for a soothing cup of tea and the chance to sit at the kitchen table and reflect, to try and get my head around it all. It was a lot to ask of weak tea, but we didn’t stock horse tranquilisers.

  Stalking ahead, he turned and threw his hands up in frustration. “Winnie! This is not a Sunday tour of the real estate. Right now, Bea and the others are risking themselves to keep you safe. The least we can do is toe the line from our end. Do I really have to carry you?”

  The stand off took place on the veranda outside Bea’s room. I didn’t appreciate his tone, self-pity at the craziness of this new existence getting the better of me.

  “Maybe this is all easier for you to accept, Smith. You’ve been astral travelling in my life for months. Wouldn’t you be shocked too, if the judg
e turned out completely different to what you’d always assumed?”

  How did other teens spend their Sundays? Not ransacking their homes for weapons to defend against ill-defined devils, I bet. Not scared witless because their family was decaying before their very eyes. My voice rose as stress threatened to tow me under.

  “Everything and everyone I know, including you, is suddenly an alien!”

  “Believe me, having a new stepmother every other year is alien enough. Especially when some of them are more appropriate as sisters.” He took a step towards me, palms raised. “Try and concentrate on the present. Keep calm, Bear.”

  “You keep calm,” I yelled, thoroughly over it. “Who made you the boss, anyway?”

  “The voice of reason.”

  “Reason?” I scoffed. “That particular friend of logic and common sense flew out the window a while ago.”

  Smith rolled his eyes to the heavens. “We really don’t have time for this. Can we just delay the nervous breakdown until we get below?”

  “How many times must I remind you? I’m claustrophobic. Going below will promote the nervous breakdown,” I snapped.

  Outside, the downpour broke loose with a deafening roll of thunder that rattled the windows. We both flinched. He looked at me from beneath long lashes with pleading eyes and I relented. It was hard to reconcile his man’s physique with the fretting boy before me.

  With a put-upon sigh, I said, “Bea’s room it is,