He lifted a hand in agreement. “I have to get back to the others. And you still haven’t said who you are.”
“I know I haven’t.” He heard her draw a breath. “I’m nervous. I didn’t want to do it this way.” Another silence. “I’m your aunt, Ned. Meghan’s older sister. The one who went away.”
Ned felt his heart thud. He gripped the phone tightly. “My . . . her . . . ? You’re my Aunt Kim?”
“I am, dear. Oh, Ned, where do we meet?”
HE WAS WALKING in the night under that nearly full moon. They’d dropped him at the bottom of the hill where their road wound through trees to the villa. He’d said he wanted to take a walk, it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. His mother probably wouldn’t have let him, his father was easier that way. He’d reminded them he had the cellphone.
He couldn’t jog, he wasn’t wearing running shoes, which gave him more time to think. He listened for a car behind him. He’d given her the best directions he could. She’d said she’d find it. She might be ahead of him, too: he had no idea where she’d been when she called.
He was still in shock, he decided, whatever that actually meant.
He had believed her, on the phone.
Reckless, maybe, but there was no real way not to believe someone saying she was your aunt, the one you’d never met. And it fit with things he’d known all his life—adult talk overheard before sleep, from another room. It also made sense of that feeling he’d had that the voice—accent and all—wasn’t as unknown as it should have been.
It was close to his mother’s, he’d realized, after hanging up.
Things like that could make you believe someone.
The road went up for a pretty fair distance, actually, when you weren’t running. He finally came to the car barrier again. There was a red Peugeot with a rental licence parked there. No one in it. Ned walked around the barrier, came up to the wooden sign again, under stars this time, and turned left towards the tower.
After a few minutes he saw it, looming darkly at the end of the path. He hadn’t been able to think of any other place. It wasn’t as if he knew his way around here. She’d said she wanted to be where no one could sneak up on them.
No crowds here, that was for sure. He was alone on the path. Or he assumed he was. It occurred to him that it would have been smart to bring a flashlight—and in the same moment he saw a beam of light beside the tower. It flicked on and off, on and off.
His heart was beating fast as he walked towards it. Impulsively, feeling a bit stupid, he tried to reach inside himself, to whatever had let him sense the man in the cloister yesterday and again in the café this afternoon.
He stopped dead in his tracks. He swallowed hard.
The awareness of a presence ahead of him was so strong it was frightening. Once he’d looked for it, there was this glow in his mind where she was: green-gold, like leaves at the beginning of spring.
“That’s me, dear,” he heard her call out. Same voice, same very slight British accent. “Interesting you found me. I think it must be a family thing. I’m going to screen myself now. I don’t want them to know I’m here yet.”
“Why? And who? Whom?”
The man in the café had talked about that screening thing too. Ned started walking, towards the flashlight, and to where he could sense the glow of her. Not a shining so as to illuminate the night, but within him, placing her in the landscape like some kind of sonar. Then, a moment later, the green-gold went out.
“It’s ‘whom,’ I think,” she said. “Your mother was always better at that sort of thing. Hello, Ned Marriner. Nephew. May I please hug you? Is that unfair?”
She’d been sitting on a boulder beside the low barrier ringing the tower. Now she stood up and came towards him, and in the moonlight Ned saw his aunt for the first time in his life.
He wasn’t sure, actually, how he felt about being hugged, but she opened her arms so he did the same, and he felt her draw him to her, and hold on.
He became aware, after a moment, that she was crying. She let him go and stepped back, wiping at her eyes with the back of one hand. She was slim, not too tall, a lot like his mother.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry. This is so uncool, I do know that.”
He cleared his throat. “Well, aunts aren’t usually cool.”
He saw her smile. “I thought I’d try to be,” she said.
She looked at him. For some reason Ned found himself standing as straight as he could. Stupid, really.
“You look wonderful,” she said. “I haven’t seen any pictures since your gran died two years ago.”
Ned blinked. “Gran sent you pictures? Of me?”
“Of course she did, silly. She was so proud of you. So am I.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Ned said. “You never even knew me. To be proud or anything.”
She said nothing for a moment, then turned and went back to the boulder and sat on it again. He followed a few steps. He wished there was more light so he could see her better. Her hair was very pale, could be blond but he was guessing grey. She was older than his mom, six or seven years.
She said, “A lot of things in families don’t make sense, dear. A lot of things in life.”
“Right,” Ned said. “I get that. It’s kind of in my face now.”
“I know. That’s why I came. To tell you it’s all right.”
“How do you know?”
Choosing her words, she said, “Yesterday you entered a space I’ve been in for some time. When it happened I became aware of it, of you, from where I was. The family thing, I guess.”
“Where’s that? Where you were?”
She wasn’t hesitating now. “England. In the southwest. A place called Glastonbury.”
“That’s . . . where you live?”
“With your uncle, yes. That’s where we live.”
“Why? Why did you go away?”
She sighed. “Oh, Ned. That’s such a long answer. Can I just say, for a bit, that I feel easier there than anywhere else? I have . . . a complicated connection to it? That isn’t a good answer, but the good one would take all night.”
“Fine, but why did you cut yourself off from . . . from us?”
It had happened years before he was born, before there’d been any “us,” but she’d know what he meant.
She had clasped her hands loosely, was gazing up at him. It was weird, but even in moonlight he could see how much she looked like his mom. That gesture was his mother’s, even, when she was listening, making herself be patient.
“I didn’t, really. Cut myself off. We always kept track of you three through my mother, your gran. I told you, families are tricky. Meghan felt, rightly I suppose, that I’d done something totally unexpected in getting married so quickly to someone she didn’t even know, moving to England right away. She felt I’d abandoned her. She was . . . very angry. Didn’t want phone calls, or letters, or emails later. Hung up on me, didn’t write back. She was only seventeen when I left, remember?”
“How can I remember?” he said.
He saw her smile. “Now that sounds like Meghan.”
He made a face. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be, but you do know what I mean? Big sister marries a stranger, city hall, no proper ceremony, moves across the ocean, changes all her life plans? Without any warning. And there was . . . there was more to it.”
“Like?”
She sighed. “That gets us to the all-night part. Let’s say I was involved in something connected to what you felt yesterday. It runs in our family, Ned, on the maternal side, as far back as I’ve been able to trace, disappearing, showing up again. And in me it included some other things that turned out to be really important. And really, really difficult? That changed me. A lot, Ned. Made it impossible to be what I’d been before. Or stay where I’d been.”
It sounded, weirdly, as if she were asking his forgiveness.
He thought about how he’d felt by the mountain e
arlier today, and in the cloister before. The impossibility of explaining, making sense of it. “I might be able to understand some of that,” he said.
“Thank you, dear.” She looked up at him. “I thought you’d be feeling afraid, and confused, so I came to let you know you aren’t alone. Not the first. In this.”
She stopped. It seemed she was crying again. She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I swore I wouldn’t cry. Your uncle said I didn’t have a hope. I actually bet him.”
“You lose, I guess. Where is he? My uncle.”
She wiped at her eyes with a Kleenex. “I don’t know if I should tell you,” she said.
Ned shook his head. “Too many secrets. Gets screwy.”
She stared up at him. “You’re probably right. Between us, Ned?”
He nodded.
“Dave is north of Darfur.”
It took him a moment. “The Sudan? But that’s . . . my mom is . . .”
“Your mother’s there, yes. Your uncle’s watching over her.”
His mouth had dropped open, comically, like in a cartoon. “Does she . . . does my mom know that?”
His aunt laughed aloud. A burst of amusement that made her seem much younger. “Does Meghan know? Are you crazy? Ned, she’d . . . she’d spit, she’d be so angry!”
He honestly couldn’t imagine his mother spitting. Maybe as a ten-year-old . . . but he couldn’t picture her as ten, either. Or seventeen, feeling abandoned by her sister.
He said, really carefully, “Let me get this. My uncle is there secretly? To keep an eye on my mom?”
Aunt Kim nodded. “I told you, we’ve been keeping track of all of you. But she’s the one I worry about.”
“Why her?”
She was silent.
“Too many secrets,” he repeated.
“This is your mother, dear. It isn’t fair, this conversation we’re having.”
“So it isn’t fair. Tell me. Why?”
Gravely, his aunt said, “Because I think Meghan does some of what she does—the war zones, choosing the worst places—as a response to what I told her I’d done, just before I went away. I made a mistake, telling her.”
Ned said nothing. He couldn’t begin to think of what to say. He felt shaky.
She saw that, went on talking, quietly. “She’d thought . . . I would be an ambitious doctor, try to do good in a big way. I’d talked like that to her when she was young. Big sister, kid sister, sharing my future. Then I . . . had that experience, and everything changed. I went off to some village in England to spend my life doing country medicine. Childbirth and checkups. Runny noses, flu shots. Everything scaled way down. After the one very big thing she never understood, or accepted.”
“That’s . . . what you do?”
She smiled. “Runny noses? Yes, it is. I also have a garden,” she added.
Ned rubbed at the back of his head. “And you think . . . ?”
“I think Meghan’s been showing me, and herself, what she believes I should have been like. What I rejected. Along with rejecting her. And she’s proving she can do it better.”
Ned was silent. After pushing to hear this, he wasn’t sure he’d been right, if this was something he really wanted to know.
“Ned, listen. People do wonderful things for complicated reasons. It happens all the time. Your mother is a hero where she goes. People are in awe of her. Maybe you don’t know that—she probably doesn’t tell. But your uncle knows, he’s been there, he’s seen it.”
“He’s done this before?”
“Only when we knew she was going somewhere very bad.” She hesitated. “Three times, before this one.”
“How? How did you know where she was going?”
He thought he saw her make a wry face in the darkness. “Dave’s talented at quite a few things. Computers are one of them. He could explain it better than I can.”
Ned thought, then he stared. “Jesus! My uncle hacked Doctors Without Borders? Their server?”
Aunt Kim sighed. “I’ve never liked that word. Hacked is so illegal-sounding.”
“Well, it is illegal!”
“I suppose,” she said, sounding cross. “I’ve told him I don’t approve. He says he needs to know what she’s doing with enough time to get there himself.”
Ned shook his head stubbornly. “Great. So he just drops his own life and goes there too. And . . . and what was Uncle Dave going to do if Mom was attacked or kidnapped by insurgents? In Iraq or Rwanda, or wherever? The crazy places.”
The anger he lived with, the fear, dull as an ache, hard as a callus in the heart.
His aunt said, quietly, “Don’t ask that until you’ve met him. Ned, you won’t ever know anyone more capable of dealing with such places. Believe me.”
He looked at her. “And he does this because . . . ?”
“He does it for me. Because I feel responsible.”
There was something different in her voice now. Ned looked down at her, where she was sitting on the rock, hands still clasped.
“Wow,” he said finally, shaking his head again. “That is controlling. I thought my mom was bad. Is it another family thing? Last I checked she was fortysomething years old. And you still feel responsible for her?”
Her laughter again, rueful this time. “If I plead guilty to being a worrier, will you let me off with a reprimand? And please—Ned, you mustn’t tell her!”
“She’ll spit?”
“She’ll want to murder me with a machete.”
“My mother? Are you—?”
“Shh! Hold on!”
Her tone had changed completely; there was a command in it, startlingly. Ned froze, listening. Then he, too, heard a sound.
“Shit,” whispered his aunt. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
“You swore,” Ned pointed out, a reflex; it was what he did when his mother’s language slipped.
“Hell, yes!” said his aunt, which wasn’t his mother’s reply. “We may be in trouble. Damn! My mistake, a bad one. But why would they attack us? What have you been doing here, Ned?”
“Why would who attack us?”
“Wolves.”
“What? No way. Wolves are mostly vegetarian. I learned that in school last year.”
“Then tell these to go find the salad bar,” said Aunt Kim, grimly.
Ned heard a crackle of twigs and leaves from the woods north of them, near the place where the path sloped down towards the city.
“Do you have anything? A pocket knife?” Aunt Kim asked.
He shook his head. The question chilled him.
“Find a stick then, fast, and get back towards the tower.” She flicked on her flashlight and played the beam on the ground between them and the trees.
Ned caught a glimpse of eyes shining.
He was very afraid then, unreal as it all seemed. As Kim ran her beam across the ground nearer to them, Ned saw a broken branch and darted forward to claim it.
As he did, he heard his aunt, her voice hard, icy, speaking words in a language he didn’t know, followed by silence from the darkness.
“What?” he mumbled, hurrying back beside her, breathing hard. “What did you just . . . ?”
“I asked why they’ve come to trouble the living.”
“The living? You mean humans, right? Us?”
“I mean what I said. These are spirits, Ned, taking an animal shape. They have come early, they aren’t as strong as they will be in two nights.”
Two nights.
Right, Ned thought. He knew that part. Beltaine. Hinge of the year, when souls were abroad.
Or so his gran had told him, along with other tales of the old ways. His gran had been named Deirdre and had grown up in Wales, half Welsh, half Irish. The woman beside him now was her older daughter. Things he needed to deal with were coming really fast and he didn’t know what any of it meant.
There was a green-gold presence inside him again, though, when he looked. That was Kim. She wasn’t screening herself any more.
“Were you speaking Welsh?”
“Gaelic. Closer to what they’d have spoken back when. I hope.”
“You speak Gaelic?” A dumb question.
“Took me long enough to learn. My accent’s terrible, but they’ll understand me if I’m right.”
Back when. When was that? he wanted to ask. Sometimes when you had this many questions, Ned thought, you didn’t have a clue where to start.
Another sound, to his right this time, back up the path. They were a long way from the car barrier and her car, from the road, lights, from anyone.
“You didn’t answer me,” Kim said. “Ned, what have you been doing to draw these to you?”
“Nothing on purpose, believe me. I met someone in the cathedral. Who . . . he . . . it’s complicated.”
“I’m sure,” she said dryly. “It tends to be.”
She motioned, and they moved together, stepping over the low rail towards the curved tower wall, backs to it, facing outwards. For the moment her words in that other language seemed to have frozen the creatures out there.
She flashed her beam at a sound again, found another wolf. Four of them, five? They were both peering in that direction when Ned heard a scrabbling sound to his left, beyond his aunt.
Without stopping to think, an entirely instinctive movement, he stepped past her and swung the branch up and around, hard, like a baseball bat.
He cracked the wolf on the side of the head. It was heavier than the dog had been this afternoon. It didn’t spin or flip, but it went down. Ned cried out as his injured shoulder felt the impact.
His aunt swore again. Ned heard her snap something, almost snarling it herself, in the same tongue as before, and though he couldn’t understand a word he felt himself go cold with the ferocity of what she said.
Cold in fire, he thought. There was a word for that, the sort of stupid thing you got asked on English tests.
Kim repeated whatever she’d said, same cadences, more slowly. Ned almost felt a collective intake of breath in the night, as if the very darkness was reacting to her. He was down on a knee, holding his shoulder. The wolf lay near enough for him to see it. It wasn’t moving.
“Well done,” his aunt said to him quietly. “Are you hurt?”