But after a month of this, she began to wonder if she hadn’t been punished enough for a transgression she didn’t really believe she had committed in the first place, and she screwed up her courage sufficiently to ask Miss Welser when she would be released. It was almost March, and spring training for track would begin in another few weeks. Running was Nest’s passion then as now; she did not believe she should have to give it up just because Miss Welser didn’t believe her about the book. But Miss Welser didn’t see it that way. She told Nest she would be on detention for as long as it took, that sneaking and lying were offenses that required severe punishment in order to guarantee they would not happen again.
Nest was miserable, trapped in a situation from which it did not seem she could extricate herself. Everything had begun to revolve around Miss Welser’s increasingly insufferable control over her life. If Gran noticed what was happening, she wasn’t saying, and Nest wasn’t about to tell her. At twelve, she was beginning to learn she had to work most things out for herself.
Finally, with only a week to go before the start of track season, she told her coach, Mr. Thomas, she might not be able to compete. One thing led to another, and she ended up telling him everything. Coach Thomas was a big, barrel-chested man who preached dedication and self-sacrifice to his student athletes. Winning wasn’t the only thing, he was fond of saying, but it wasn’t chopped liver either.
He seemed perplexed by her attitude. “How long have you been going in after school?” he asked, as if maybe he hadn’t heard her correctly. When she told him, he shook his head in disgust and waved her out the door. “Tell Miss Welser that track begins on Monday next and Coach Thomas wants you out here training with everyone else and not in the library shelving books.”
Nest did what she was told, thinking she would probably end up being sentenced to the library for life. But Miss Welser never said a word. She just nodded and looked away. Nest finished out the week and never went back. After a while, she realized she should have spoken up sooner, that she should have insisted on a meeting with the principal or her adviser. Miss Welser had kept her coming in because she hadn’t stood up for herself. She had given Miss Welser power over her life simply by accepting the premise that she wasn’t in a position to do anything about it. It was a mistake she did not make again.
Staring at the space Findo Gask had occupied only moments before, she thought about that incident. If she gave the demon power over her by conceding that she was frightened, she lost any chance of ever being free of him.
Of course, there was a certain amount of risk involved in standing up for yourself, but sometimes it was a risk you had to take.
Ross, Bennett, and the children came up to her, Ross’s hands knotted about his rune-scrolled staff as he limped past her a few steps to study carefully the tree-thrown shadows. Far back in the hazy gloom of the conifers, there was a hint of movement. Ross started toward it. He looked so tightly strung that Nest was afraid he would lash out at anything that moved.
“John,” she said quietly, drawing his dark gaze back to hers. “Let him go.”
Ross shook his head slowly. “I don’t think I should. I think I should settle this here and now.”
“Maybe that’s what he’s hoping you’ll try to do. He said he wasn’t alone.” She paused to let the implication sink in. “Leave it for another time. Let’s just go home.”
“I don’t like that old man,” Bennett muttered, her thin face haunted as she pulled Harper close. “What was he talking about, anyway? It was hard to hear.”
“Scary man,” her daughter murmured, hugging her back.
“Scary is right,” Nest agreed, ruffling the little girl’s parka hood in an effort to lighten the mood. Her eyes found Bennett’s, and she spoke over the top of Harper’s head. “Mr. Gask thinks we have something that belongs to him. He’s not very rational about the matter, and I can’t seem to persuade him to leave us alone. If he comes to the house again, don’t open the door, not for any reason.”
Bennett’s mouth tightened. “Don’t worry, I won’t.” Then she shrugged. “Anyway, Penny said he—”
She caught herself and tried to turn away, but Nest moved quickly in front of her. “Penny? Penny who? What did Penny say?”
Bennett shook her head quickly. “Nothing. I was just—”
It can’t be, Nest was thinking, remembering the strange, wild-haired girl at the church. “Penny who?” she pressed, refusing to back off.
“Leave me alone!”
“Penny who, Bennett?”
Bennett stopped moving, head lifting, eyes defiant. She brushed at her lank hair with one gloved hand. “Get over yourself, Nest! I don’t have to tell you anything!”
“I know that,” Nest said. “You don’t. But this is important. Please. Penny who?”
Bennett took a deep breath and looked off into the distance. “I don’t know. She didn’t tell me her last name. She’s just a girl I met, that’s all. Just someone I talked to a couple times.”
“Someone who knows Findo Gask?”
Bennett flicked her fingers in a dismissive gesture. “She says he’s her uncle. Who knows?” She fumbled in her pockets for her cigarettes. “I don’t think she likes him any more than we do. She makes fun of him all the time.”
“All the time,” Nest repeated, watching as Bennett lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Like all last night, maybe. Because that’s who you were with. “What did she say about Findo Gask?” she asked again.
Bennett blew out a thin stream of smoke. “Just that he was leaving town in a day or so and wouldn’t be back. Said it was the only thing they’d ever agreed on, him leaving this pissant little town.” She sighed. “I just thought that meant we probably wouldn’t be seeing him again because he’d be gone, that’s all. What’s the big deal?”
Ross was staring at both of them, eyes shifting from one to the other.
“Does Penny have wild red hair?” Nest asked quietly.
Bennett’s gaze lifted. “Yeah. How did you know that?”
Nest wondered how she could explain. She decided she couldn’t. “I want you to listen to me, Bennett,” she said instead. “I can’t tell you how to live your life. I won’t even try. It’s not my job. You’re here with Harper because you want to be, and I don’t want to chase you off by giving you a lot of orders. But I won’t look the other way when I think you’re in danger. So here it is. Stay away from Penny and Gask and anyone you think might be friendly toward them. You’ll have to trust me on this, just like I have to trust you on some other things. Okay?”
“Yeah, okay.” Bennett took a last drag on her cigarette and dropped it into the snow. “I guess.”
Nest shook her head quickly. “No guessing. I know a few things you don’t, and this is one. These are dangerous people. Penny as much as Gask. I don’t care what she says or does, she isn’t your friend. Stay away from her.”
Ross glanced past her to where they were bringing up Ray Childress from the bayou. “Maybe we ought to get back to the house,” he said, catching her eye.
Nest turned without another word and started walking. Maybe we ought to dig ourselves a hole, crawl into it, and pull the ground up over our heads instead, she thought. Because not much of anywhere else is looking very safe.
But she kept the thought to herself.
Chapter 17
They had crossed the park road onto the flats and were starting for home when Nest changed her mind and told the others to go on without her. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, but she felt a compelling need to visit the graves of her grandparents and mother. She hadn’t been up that way recently, although she had intended to go more than once, and her encounter with Findo Gask lent new urgency to her plans. There was a danger in putting things off for too long. Ross, Bennett, and the children could go back to the house and get started on decorating the tree. Everything they needed was in labeled boxes in the garage. She would catch up with them shortly.
Bennett and the children
were accepting enough, but Ross looked worried. Without saying so, he made it clear he was concerned that Findo Gask might still be somewhere in the park. Nest had considered the possibility, but she didn’t think there was much danger of a second encounter. The park was full of families and dog walkers, and there would be other visitors to the cemetery as well.
“This won’t take long,” she assured him. “I’ll just walk up, be by myself for a few moments, and walk back.” She glanced at the sky. “I want to get there before it snows again.”
Ross offered to accompany her, rather pointedly she thought, but she demurred. He would be needed to help with the Christmas tree, she told him just as pointedly, nodding toward Bennett and the children. Ross understood.
She set off at a steady pace across the flats until she reached the road again, then began following its plowed surface west toward the bluffs. The sky was blanketed with clouds, and the first slow-spiraling flakes of new snow were beginning to fall. West, from where the weather was approaching, it was dark and hazy. The storm, when it arrived, would be a big one.
A steady stream of vehicles crawled past her, going to and from the parking lot. Some had brought toboggans lashed to the roofs of cars and shoved through the gates and back windows of SUVs. Apparently the word hadn’t gotten around yet that the slide was closed. There were sledders on the slopes leading down to the bayou, and kids ran and cavorted about the frozen playground equipment under the watchful, indulgent eyes of adults. Futile efforts to build snowmen were in progress; it was still too cold for the snow to pack.
Watching the children play, Nest was reminded how much of her life had been lived in Sinnissippi Park. When she was little, the park had been her entire world. She had known there were other places, and her grandparents had taken her to some of them. She understood that there was a world outside her own. But that world didn’t matter. That world was as distant and removed as the moon. Her family and friends lived at the edge of the park. Pick lived in the park. Even the feeders appeared to her mostly in the park. The magic, of course, had its origins in the park, and Gran and the Freemark women for five generations back had cared for that magic.
It wasn’t until the summer of her fourteenth birthday, when her father came back into her life, that everything changed. The park was still hers, but it was never again the same. Her father’s deadly machinations forced her to give up her child’s world and embrace a much larger one. Perhaps it was inevitable that it should happen, later if not then. Whatever the case, she made the necessary adjustment.
But even after growing up and moving away for a time, even with all she had experienced, she never lost the sense of belonging that she found in the park. She marveled at it now, as she walked down the snow-packed road in the wintry gray light—the way she felt at peace in its confines, at home in its twenty acres of timber and playground and picnic areas. Even now, when there was reason to be wary of what might be lurking there, she did not feel threatened. It was the legacy of her childhood, of her formative years, spent amid magic and magic’s creatures, within a world that few others even knew existed.
She wondered if she would ever lose that. She couldn’t be sure, especially now. Findo Gask was a powerful and intrusive presence, and his intent was to undo everything in her life. To take her life, she corrected herself quickly, if he could find a way to do so. She looked off across the river, where smoke from fireplace chimneys lifted in the air like streamers. It was the John Ross factor again. Every time she connected with him, her life changed in a way she hadn’t imagined was possible. It would do so again this time. It was foolish to believe otherwise.
She shook her head at the enormity of this admission. It would crush her if she tried to accept its weight all at once. She would have to shoulder it a little at a time, and not let herself be overwhelmed. Maybe then she could manage to carry it.
The wind gusted hard and quick down the road, sending a stinging spray of ice needles against her skin and down her throat. The cold was raw and sharp, but it made her feel alive. Despondent over the death of Ray Childress and angered by her confrontation with Findo Gask, she felt exhilarated nevertheless. It was in her nature to feel positive, to pull herself up by her emotional bootstraps. But it was her symbiotic relationship with the park as well. There was that link between them, that tie that transcended every life change she had experienced in her twenty-nine years.
Maybe, she mused hopefully, she could save her connection with the park this time, too. Even with the changes she knew she must undergo. Even with the return of John Ross.
She crossed the bridge where the road split off and curved down to the bayou and to the caves where the feeders lived, making instead for the summit of the cliffs and the turnaround. The parking area was empty, and the snow stretched away into the trees, undisturbed and pristine. In the shadowed evergreens, a handful of feeders crouched, their flat, empty eyes watchful. They had no particular interest in her now, but that could change in a heartbeat.
She found the gap in the cemetery fence that had opened two years ago and not yet been repaired, and she squeezed herself through. Riverside’s tombstones and monuments stretched away before her, their bumpy, rolling acres dissected by roads that meandered in long, looping ribbons through clusters of old hardwoods and shaggy conifers. The roads were plowed, and she trudged to the nearest and followed it on toward the edge of the bluffs. The wind had picked up, and the snowflakes were falling more quickly, beginning to form a curtain against the gray backdrop of failing light. It would be dark by four o’clock, the evening settling in early during the winter solstice, the days gone short and the nights made long. She pulled up her collar and picked up her pace.
When she reached the plots of her grandparents and of her mother, she knelt in the snow before them. Snow layered the rough-cut tops of the marble and the well-tended grounds beneath, but the vertical surface of the stone was clear and legible. She read the names to herself in silence. Robert Roosevelt Freemark. Evelyn Opal Freemark. Caitlin Anne Freemark. Her grandparents and her mother, laid to rest in a tree-shaded spot that overlooked the river. One day she would be there, too. She wondered if she would see them then. If she did, she wondered how it would feel.
“Kind of a cold day for paying your respects to the dead,” a voice from behind her remarked.
From her kneeling position, she glanced over her shoulder at Two Bears. He stood a few paces back, beefy arms folded over his big chest. Snowflakes spotted his braided black hair and his ribbed army sweater. One arm encircled his bedroll and gripped his rucksack, which hung down against his camouflage pants and heavy boots. For as little clothing as he wore, he did not seem cold.
“Don’t you ever wear a coat?” she asked, swiveling slightly without rising.
He shrugged. “When it gets cold enough, I do. What brings you to visit the spirits of your ancestors, little bird’s Nest? Are you lonesome for the dead?”
“For Gran and Old Bob, I am. I think of them all the time. I remember how good they made me feel when they were around. I miss them most at Christmas, when family is so important.” She cocked her head, reflecting. “I miss my mother, too, but in a different way. I never knew her. I guess I miss her for that.”
He came forward a few paces. “I miss my people in the same way.”
“You haven’t found them yet, I guess.”
He shook his head. “Haven’t looked all that hard. Calling up the spirits of the dead takes a certain amount of preparation. It takes effort. It requires a suspension of the present and a step across the Void into the future. It means that we must meet halfway between life and death.” He looked out across the river. “No one lives on that ground. Only visitors come there.”
She came to her feet and brushed the snow from her knees. “I took your suggestion. I tried talking with the gypsy morph. It didn’t work. He wouldn’t talk back. He just stared at me—when he bothered looking at me at all. I sat up with him last night for several hours, and I couldn’t get
a word out of him.”
“Be patient. He is just a child. Less than thirty days old. Think of what he has seen, how he must feel about life. He has been hunted since birth.”
“But he asked for me!” she snapped impatiently. “He came here to find me!”
Two Bears shifted his weight. “Perhaps the next step requires more time and effort. Perhaps the next step doesn’t come so easily.”
“But if he would just tell me—”
“Perhaps he is, and you are not listening.”
She stared at him. “What does that mean? He doesn’t talk!” Then she blinked in recognition. “Oh. You mean he might be trying to communicate in some other way?”
Two Bears smiled. “I’m only a shaman, little bird’s Nest, not a prophet. I’m a Sinnissippi Indian who is homeless and tribeless and tired of being both. I give advice that feels right to me, but I cannot say what will work. Trust your own judgment in this. You still have your magic, don’t you?”
Her mouth tightened reproachfully. “You know I do. But my magic is a toy, all but that part that comprises Wraith and belonged to my father. You’re not trying to tell me I should use that?”
He shook his head. “You are too quick to dismiss your abilities and to disparage your strengths. Think a moment. You have survived much. You have accomplished much. You are made more powerful by having done so. You should remember that.”
A smile quirked at the corners of her mouth. “Isn’t it enough that I remember to speak your name? O’olish Amaneh. I say it every time I feel weak or frightened or too much alone. I use it like a talisman.”
The copper face warmed, and the big man nodded approvingly. “I can feel it when you do so. In here.” He tapped his chest. “When you speak my name, you give me strength as well. You remember me, so that I will not be forgotten.”
“Well, I don’t know that it does much good, but if you think so, I’m glad.” She sighed and exhaled a cloud of frosty air. “I better be getting back.” She glanced skyward. “It’s getting dark fast.”