Contents 20 страница

Damon. Her carriage saved your lives.” Bonnie had leaned forward to

whisper, “And Meredith told me—it’s a secret, but not from you—that

being bitten isn’t that bad. There!” And Bonnie, like the kitten she was,

had yawned and stretched. “I would have been bitten next,” she’d said

almost wistfully, and quickly added, “but you needed my blood. Human

blood, but mine especially. I guess they know all about blood types here

because they can taste and smell the differences.” Then she gave a little

jump and said, “Do you want to look at the fox key half? We were so

sure it was all over and we’d never ever find it, but when Meredith went

in the bedroom to get bitten—and I promise that was all they

did—Damon gave it to her and asked her to keep it. So she did and she

took good care of it and it’s in a little chest Lucen made out of

something that looks like plastic but it’s not.”

Elena had admired the little crescent, but other than that there was

nothing to do in bed but talk and read classical books or encyclopedias

from Earth. They wouldn’t even let her and Damon rest in the same

room.

Elena knew why. They were afraid she wouldn’t just talk to

Damon. They were afraid that she would get near to him and smell his

exotic familiar smell, made up of Italian bergamot, mandarin, and

cardamom, and that she would look up into his black eyes that could

hold universes inside the pupils, and that her knees would go weak and

she’d wake up a vampire.

They didn’t know anything! She and Damon had been safely

exchanging blood for weeks before the crisis. If there was nothing to

drive him out of sanity again, the way the pain had before, he would

conduct himself like a perfect gentleman.

“Hm,” Bonnie said, upon hearing this protest, pushing a tiny throw

pillow around with toenails that had been painted silver. “I maybe

wouldn’t tell them that you’ve been exchanging blood so many times

from the beginning. It might make them go ‘Aha!’ or something. You

know, read something into it.”

“There’s nothing to read into. I’m here to collect my beloved

Damon and Stefan is just helping me.”

Bonnie looked at her with her brows knitted and her mouth pursed,

but didn’t venture a word.

“Bonnie?”

“Um-hm?”

“Did I just say what I thought I said?”

“Um- hm. ”

Elena, with one motion, gathered an armful of pillows and

deposited them on her face. “Could you please tell chef that I want

another steak and a big glass of milk?” she requested in a muffled voice

from under the pillows. “I’m not well.”

Matt had a new junk car. He was always able to get his hands on

one when he really needed it. And now he was driving, in fits and starts,

to Obaasan’s house.

Mrs. Saitou’s house, he corrected himself hastily. He didn’t want

to tread on unfamiliar cultural customs, not when he was asking for a

favor.

The door at the Saitous’ was opened by a woman Matt had never

seen before. She was an attractive woman, dressed very dramatically in a

wide scarlet skirt—or maybe in very wide scarlet pants—she stood with

her feet so far apart that it was hard to tell. She wore a white blouse. Her

face was striking: two swaths of straight black hair and a smaller, neater

swath of bangs that came to her eyebrows.

But the most striking thing of all about her was that she was

holding a long curved sword, pointed directly at Matt.

“H-hi,” Matt said, when the door swung open to reveal this

apparition.

“This is a good house,” the woman replied. “This is not a house of

evil spirits.”

“I never thought it was,” Matt said, retreating as the woman

advanced. “Honest.”

The woman shut her eyes, seemed to be searching for something in

her own mind. Then, abruptly, she lowered the sword. “You speak the

truth. You mean no harm. Please come in.”

“Thank you,” Matt said. He’d never been so happy to have an

older woman accept him.

“Orime,” came a thin, feeble voice from upstairs. “Is that one of

the children?”

“Yes, Hahawe,” called the woman that Matt couldn’t help thinking

of as “the woman with the sword.”

“Send him up, why don’t you?”

“Of course, Hahawe.”

“Ha ha—I mean ‘Hahawe’?” Matt said, turning a nervous laugh

into a desperate sentence as the sword swung by his midriff again. “Not

Obaasan?”

The sword-woman smiled for the first time. “ Obaasan means

grandmother. Hahawe is one of the ways to say mother. But mother

won’t mind at all if you call her Obaasan; it’s a friendly greeting for a

woman of her age.”

“Okay,” Matt said, trying his best to seem like an all-around

friendly guy.

Mrs. Saitou gestured him up the stairs and he peeped into several

rooms before he found one with a large futon in the exact middle of a

completely bare floor, and in it a woman who seemed so tiny and

doll-like as not to be real.

Her hair was just as soft and black as the sword-woman’s

downstairs. It was put up or arranged somehow so that it lay around her

like a halo as she lay on the bed. But the dark lashes on the pale cheeks

were shut and Matt wondered if she had fallen into one of the sudden

slumbers of the elderly.

But then quite abruptly, the doll-like lady opened her eyes and

smiled. “Why, it’s Masato-chan!” she said, looking at Matt.

Bad beginning. If she didn’t even recognize that a blond guy

wasn’t her Japanese friend from about sixty years ago…

But then she was laughing, with her small hands in front of her

mouth. “I know, I know,” she said. “You’re not Masato. He became a

banker, very rich. Very thick. Especially in the head and the stomach.”

She smiled at him again. “Sit down, please. You can call me

Obaasan if you want, or Orime. My daughter was named for me. But life

has been hard for her, as it was for me. Being a shrine maiden— and a

samurai…it takes discipline and much work. And my Orime did so

well…until we came here. We were looking for a town that would be

peaceful and quiet. Instead, Isobel found…Jim. And Jim was…untrue.”

Matt’s throat swelled with the desire to defend his friend, but what

defense could there be? Jim had spent one night with Caroline—at

Caroline’s pressing invitation. And he had become possessed and had

brought that possession to his girlfriend Isobel, who had pierced her

body grotesquely—among other things.

“We’ve got to get them,” Matt found himself saying earnestly.

“The kitsune who started it all—who started it with Caroline. Shinichi

and his sister Misao.”

“Kitsune.” Obaasan was nodding her head. “Yes, I said there

would be one involved from the very beginning. Let me see; I blessed

some charms and amulets for your friends….”

“And some bullets. I just sort of filled my pockets,” Matt said,

embarrassed, as he spilled out a jumble of different calibers on the edge

of her futon cover. “I even found some prayers on the Web about getting

rid of them.”

“Yes, you’ve been very thorough. Good.” Obaasan looked at the

hard copies he’d printed of the prayers. Matt squirmed, knowing that he

had only been running down Meredith’s To-Do list, and that the credit

really belonged to her.

“I’ll bless the bullets first and then I’ll write out more amulets,”

she said. “Put the amulets wherever you need protection most. And,

well, I suppose you know what to do with the bullets.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Matt fumbled in his pockets for the last few, put

them into Obaasan’s outstretched hands. Then she chanted a long,

elaborate prayer holding her tiny hands out over the bullets. Matt didn’t

find the incantation frightening, but he knew that as a psychic he was a

dud, and that Bonnie had probably seen and heard things he couldn’t.

“Should I aim for any particular part of them?” Matt asked,

watching the old woman and trying to follow along on his own copy of

the prayers.

“No, any part of the body or head will do. If you take out a tail,

you’ll make it weaker, but you’ll enrage it, as well.” Obaasan paused

and coughed, a small dry old-lady cough. Before Matt could offer to run

downstairs and get her a drink, Mrs. Saitou entered the room with a tray

and three cups of tea in little bowls.

“Thank you for waiting,” she said politely as she knelt fluidly to

serve them. Matt found with the first sip that the steaming green tea was

much better than he’d expected from his few experiences at restaurants.

And then there was silence. Mrs. Saitou sat looking at the teacup,

Obaasan lay looking white and shrunken under the futon cover, and Matt

felt a storm of words building up in his own throat.

Finally, even though good sense was counseling him not to speak,

he burst out, “God, I’m so sorry about Isobel, Mrs. Saitou! She doesn’t

deserve any of this! I just wanted you to know that I—I’m just so sorry,

and I’m going to get the kitsune who’s at the bottom of it. I promise you,

I’ll get him!”

“Kitsune?” Mrs. Saitou said sharply, staring at him as if he’d gone

mad. Obaasan looked on in pity from her pillow. Then, without waiting

to gather up the tea things, Mrs. Saitou jumped up and ran out of the

room.

Matt was left speechless. “I—I—”

Obaasan spoke from her pillow. “Don’t be too distressed, young

man. My daughter, although a priestess, is very modern in her outlook.

She would probably tell you that kitsune don’t even exist.”

“Even after—I mean how does she think Isobel—?”

“She thinks that there are evil influences in this town, but of the

‘ordinary, human’ kind. She thinks Isobel did what she did because of

the stress she was under, trying to be a good student, a good priestess, a

good samurai.”

“You mean, like, Mrs. Saitou feels guilty?”

“She blames Isobel’s father for much of it. He is a ‘salaryman’

back in Japan.” Obaasan paused. “I don’t know why I have told you all

this.”

“I’m sorry,” Matt said hastily. “I wasn’t trying to snoop.”

“No, but you care about other people. I wish Isobel had had a boy

like you instead of her daughter.”

Matt thought of the pitiful figure he’d seen at the hospital. Most of

Isobel’s scars would end up invisible under her clothes—presuming she

learned to speak again. Bravely, he said, “Well, I’m still up for grabs.”

Obaasan smiled faintly at him, then put her head back down on the

pillow—no, it was a wooden headrest, Matt realized. It didn’t look very

comfortable. “It’s a great pity when there has to be strife between a

human family and the kitsune,” she said. “Because there are rumors that

one of our ancestors took a kitsune wife.”

“Say what?”

Obaasan laughed, again behind concealing fists.

“ Mukashi-mukashi, or as you say, long ago in the times of legend, a

great Shogun became angy at all the kitsune on his estate for the

mischief they made. For many long years they were up to all sorts of

pranks, but when he suspected them of ruining the crops in the fields,

that was it. He roused every man and woman in his household, and told

them to take sticks and arrows and rocks and hoes and brooms and flush

out all the foxes that had dens on his estate, even the ones between the

attic and the roof. He was going to have every single fox killed without

mercy. But the night before he did this, he had a dream in which a

beautiful woman came and said she was responsible for all the foxes on

the estate. ‘And,’ she said, ‘while it is true that we make mischief, we

repay you by eating the rats and mice and insects that really spoil the

crops. Won’t you agree to take your anger out just on me and execute

me alone instead of all the foxes? I will come at dawn to hear your

answer.’

“And she kept her word, this most beautiful of kitsune, arriving at

dawn with twelve beautiful maidens as attendants, but she outshone all

of them just as the moon outshines a star. The Shogun could not bring

himself to kill her, and in fact asked for her hand in marriage, and

married her twelve attendants to his twelve most loyal retainers as well.

And it is said that she was always a faithful wife, and bore him many

children as fierce as Amaterasu the sun goddess, and as beautiful as the

moon, and that this continued until one day the Shogun was on a journey

and he happened to accidentally kill a fox. He hurried home to explain to

his wife that it hadn’t been intentional, but when he arrived he found his

household in mourning, for his wife had already left him, with all his

sons and daughters.”

“Oh, too bad,” Matt muttered, trying to be polite, when his brain

elbowed him in the ribs. “Wait. But if they all left…”

“I see you’re an attentive young man,” the delicate old woman

laughed. “All his sons and daughters were gone…except the youngest, a

girl of peerless beauty, although she was just a child. She said, ‘I love

you too much to leave you, dear father, even if I must wear a human

shape all my life.’ And that is how we are said to be descended from a

kitsune.”

“Well, these kitsune aren’t just causing mischief or ruining crops,”

Matt said. “They’re out to kill. And we have to fight back.”

“Of course, of course. I didn’t mean to upset you with my little

story,” Obaasan said. “I’ll write out those amulets for you now.”

It was as Matt was leaving that Mrs. Saitou appeared at the door.

She put something into his hand. He glanced down at it and saw the

same calligraphy that Obaasan had given him. Except that it was much

smaller and written on…

“A Post-it note?” Matt asked, bewildered.

Mrs. Saitou nodded. “Very useful for slapping on the faces of

demons or the limbs of trees or such.” And, as he stared at her in

complete amazement, “My mother doesn’t know all there is to know

about everything.”

She also handed him a sturdy dagger, smaller than the sword she

was still carrying, but very serviceable—Matt immediately cut himself

on it.

“Put your faith in friends and your instincts,” she said.

Slightly dazed, but feeling encouraged, Matt drove to Dr. Alpert’s

house.

“I ’m feeling much better,” Elena told Dr. Meggar. “I’d like to take a

walk around the estate.” She tried not to bounce up and down on the

bed. “I’ve been eating steak and drinking milk and I even took that vile

cod liver oil you sent. Also I have a very firm grasp of reality: I’m here

to rescue Stefan and the little boy inside Damon is a metaphor for his

unconscious, which the blood we shared allowed me to ‘see.’” She

bounced once, but covered it by reaching for a glass of water. “I feel like

a happy puppy pulling at the leash.” She exhibited her newly designed

slave bracelets: silver with lapis lazuli inserts in fluid designs. “If I die

suddenly, I am prepared.”

Dr. Meggar’s eyebrows worked up and down. “Well, I can’t find

anything wrong with your pulse or your breathing. I don’t see how a

nice afternoon walk can hurt you. Damon’s certainly up and walking.

But don’t you go giving Lady Ulma any ideas. She still needs months of

bed rest.”

“She has a nice little desk made from a breakfast tray,” Bonnie

explained, gesturing to show size and width. “She designs clothes on

that.” Bonnie leaned forward, wide-eyed. “And you know what? Her

dresses are magic. ”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” grunted Dr. Meggar.

But the next moment Elena remembered something unpleasant.

“Even when we get the keys,” she said, “we have to plot the actual

jailbreak.”

“What’s a jailbreak?” Lakshmi asked excitedly.

“It’s like this—we’ve got the keys to Stefan’s cell, but we still

need to figure out how we’re going to get into the prison, and how we’re

going to smuggle him out.”

Lakshmi frowned. “Why not just go in with the line and take him

out the gate?”

“Because,” Elena said, trying for patience, “they won’t let us just

walk in and get him.” She narrowed her eyes as Lakshmi put her head in

her hands. “What’re you thinking, Lakshmi?”

“Well, first you say that you’re going to have the key in your hand

when you go to the prison, then you act like they’re not going to let him

out of the prison.”

Meredith shook her head, bewildered. Bonnie put a hand to her

forehead as if it ached. But Elena slowly leaned forward.

“Lakshmi,” she said, very quietly, “are you saying that if we have

a key to Stefan’s cell it’s basically a pass in and out of prison?”

Lakshmi brightened up. “Of course!” she said. “Otherwise, what

would a key be good for? They could just lock him in another cell.”

Elena could hardly believe the wonder of what she had just heard,

so she immediately began trying to poke holes in it. “That would mean

we could go straight from Bloddeuwedd’s party to the prison and just

take Stefan out,” she said with as much sarcasm as she could inject into

her voice. “We could just show our key and they’d let us take him

away.”

Lakshmi nodded eagerly. “Yes!” she said joyfully, the sarcasm

having gone right over her head. “And, don’t be mad, okay? But I

wondered why you never went to visit him.”

“We can visit him?”

“Sure, if you make an appointment.”

By now Meredith and Bonnie had come to life and were

supporting Elena on either side. “How soon can we send someone to

make an appointment?” Elena said through her teeth, because it was

taking all her effort to speak—her entire weight was resting on her two

friends. “ Who can we send to make an appointment?” she whispered.

“I’ll go,” Damon said from the crimson darkness behind them. “I’ll

go tonight—give me five minutes.”

Matt could feel that he had on his most cross and stubborn

expression.

“C’mon,” Tyrone said, looking amused. They were both gearing

up for a trip into the thicket. This meant putting on two of the

mothball-clove-recipe coats each and then using duct tape to fasten the

gloves to the coats. Matt was sweating already.

But Tyrone was a good guy, he thought. Here Matt had come out

of nowhere and said, “Hey, you know that bizarre thing you saw with

poor Jim Bryce last week? Well, it’s all connected to something even

more bizarre—all about fox spirits and the Old Wood, and Mrs. Flowers

says that if we don’t figure out what’s going on, we’re going to be in

real trouble. And Mrs. Flowers isn’t just a batty old lady at the

boardinghouse, even though everybody says so.”

“Of course she isn’t,” Dr. Alpert’s brusque voice had said from the

doorway. She put down her black bag—still a country doctor, even when

the town was in crisis—and addressed her son. “Theophilia Flowers and

I have known each other a long time—and Mrs. Saitou, too. They were

both always helping people. That’s their nature.”

“Well—” Matt had seen an opportunity and jumped at it. “Mrs.

Flowers is the one who needs help now. Really, really needs help.”

“Then what’re you sitting there for, Tyrone? Hurry up and go help

Mrs. Flowers.” Dr. Alpert had ruffled her own iron-gray hair with her

fingers, then ruffled her son’s black hair fondly.

“I was, Mom. We were just leaving when you came in.”

Tyrone, seeing Matt’s grim horror-story of a car, had politely

offered to drive them to Mrs. Flowers’s house in his Camry. Matt, afraid

of a terminal blowout at some crucial moment, was only too happy to

accept. He was glad that Tyrone would be the lynchpin of the Robert E.

Lee High football team in the coming year. Ty was the kind of guy you

could count on—as witness his immediate offer of help today. He was a

good sport, and absolutely straight and clean. Matt couldn’t help but see

how drugs and drinking had ruined not only the actual games, but the

sportsmanship of the other teams on campus.

Tyrone was also a guy who could keep his mouth shut. He hadn’t

even peppered Matt with questions as they drove back to the

boardinghouse, but he did give a wolf whistle, not at Mrs. Flowers, but

at the bright yellow Model T she was driving into the old stables.

“Whoa!” he said, jumping out to help her with a grocery bag, while

his eyes drank in the Model T from fender to fender. “That’s a Model T

Fordor Sedan! This could be one beautiful car if—” He stopped abruptly

and his brown skin burned with a sunset glow.

“Oh, my, don’t be embarrassed about the Yellow Carriage!” Mrs.

Flowers said, allowing Matt to take another bag of groceries back

through the kitchen garden and into the kitchen of the house. “She’s

served this family for nearly a hundred years, and she’s accumulated

some rust and damage. But she goes almost thirty miles an hour on

paved roads!” Mrs. Flowers added, speaking not only proudly, but with

the somewhat awed respect owed to high-speed travel.

Matt’s eyes met Tyrone’s and Matt knew there was only one

shared thought hanging in the air between them.

To restore to perfection the dilapidated, worn, but still beautiful car

that spent most of its time in a converted stable.

“We could do it,” Matt said, feeling that, as Mrs. Flowers’s

representative, he should make the offer first.

“We sure could,” Tyrone said dreamily. “She’s already in a double

garage—no problems about room.”

“We wouldn’t have to strip her down to the frame…she really

rides like a dream.”

“You’re kidding! We could clean the engine, though: have a look

at the plugs and belts and hoses and stuff. And”—dark eyes gleaming

suddenly—“my dad has a power sander. We could strip the paint and

repaint it the exact same yellow!”

Mrs. Flowers suddenly beamed. “That was what dear Ma ma was

waiting for you to say, young man,” she said, and Matt remembered his

manners long enough to introduce Tyrone.

“Now, if you had said, ‘We’ll paint her burgundy’ or ‘blue’ or any

other color, I’m sure she would have objected,” Mrs. Flowers said as she

began to make ham sandwiches, potato salad, and a large kettle of baked

beans. Matt watched Tyrone’s reaction to the mention of “Ma ma ” and

was pleased: there was an instant of surprise, followed by an expression

like calm water. His mother had said Mrs. Flowers wasn’t a batty old

lady: therefore she wasn’t a batty old lady. A huge weight seemed to roll

off Matt’s shoulders. He wasn’t alone with a fragile elderly woman to

protect. He had a friend who was actually a little bigger than he was to

rely on.

“Now both of you, have a ham sandwich, and I’ll make the potato

salad while you’re eating. I know that young men”—Mrs. Flowers

always spoke of men as if they were a special kind of flower—“need lots

of good hearty meat before going into battle, but there’s no reason to be

formal. Let’s just dig right in as things are done.”

They had happily obeyed. Now they were preparing for battle,

feeling ready to fight tigers, since Mrs. Flowers’s idea of dessert was a

pecan pie split between the boys, along with huge cups of coffee that

cleared the brain like a power sander.

Tyrone and Matt drove Matt’s junker to the cemetery, followed by

Mrs. Flowers in the Model T. Matt had seen what the trees could do to

cars and he wasn’t going to subject Tyrone’s whistle-clean Camry to the

prospect. They walked down the hill to Matt and Sergeant Mossberg’s

hide, each of the boys giving a hand to help the frail Mrs. Flowers over

rough bits. Once, she tripped and would have fallen, but Tyrone dug the

toes of his DC shoes into the hill and stood like a mountain as she

tumbled against him.

“Oh, my—thank you, Tyrone dear,” she murmured and Matt knew

that “Tyrone dear” had been accepted into the fold.

The sky was dark except for one streak of scarlet as they reached

the hide. Mrs. Flowers took out the sheriff’s badge, rather clumsily, due

to the gardening gloves she was wearing. First she held it to her

forehead, then she slowly drew it away, still holding it in front of her at

eye-level. “He stood here and then he bent down and squatted here,” she

said, getting down in what was—in fact—the correct side of the hide.

Matt nodded, hardly knowing what he was doing, and Mrs. Flowers said

without opening her eyes, “No coaching, Matt dear. He heard someone

behind him—and whirled, drawing his gun. But it was only Matt, and

they spoke in whispers for a while.

“Then he suddenly stood up.” Mrs. Flowers stood suddenly and

Matt heard all sorts of alarming little pops and crackles in her delicate

old body. “He went walking—striding—down into that thicket. That evil

thicket.”

She set off for the thicket as Sheriff Rich Mossberg had when Matt

had watched him. Matt and Tyrone went hurrying after her, ready to stop

her if she showed any signs of entering the remnant of Old Wood that

still lived.

Instead, she walked around it, with the badge held to eye height.

Tyrone and Matt nodded at each other and without speaking, each took

one of her arms. This way they skirted the edge of the thicket, all the

way around, with Matt going first, Mrs. Flowers next, and Tyrone last.

At some point Matt realized that tears were making their way down Mrs.

Flowers’s withered cheeks.

At last, the fragile old woman stopped, took out a lacy

handkerchief—after one or two tries—and wiped her eyes with a gasp.

“Did you find him?” Matt asked, unable to hold in his curiosity

any longer.

“Well—we’ll have to see. Kitsune seem to be very, very good at

illusions. Everything I saw could have been an illusion. But”—she

heaved a sigh—“one of us is going to have to step into the Wood.”

Matt gulped. “That’ll be me, then—”

He was interrupted. “Hey, no way, man. You know their ops,

whatever they are. You’ve got to get Mrs. Flowers out of this—”

“No, I can’t risk just asking you to come over here and get hurt—”

“Well, what am I doing out here, then?” Tyrone demanded.

“Wait, my dears,” Mrs. Flowers said, sounding as if she were

about to cry. The boys shut up immediately, and Matt felt ashamed of

himself.

“I know a way that you both can help me, but it’s very dangerous.

Dangerous for the two of you. But perhaps if we only have to do it once,

we can cut the risk of danger and increase our chance of finding

something.”

“What is it?” Tyrone and Matt said almost simultaneously.

A few minutes later, they were prepped for it. They were lying side

by side, facing the wall formed by the tall trees and tangled underbrush

of the thicket. They were not only roped together, but they had Mrs.

Saitou’s Post-it notes placed all over their arms.

“Now when I say ‘three’ I want you both to reach in and grab at

the ground with your hands. If you feel something, keep hold of it and

pull your arm out. If you don’t feel anything, move your hand a little and

then pull it out as fast as you can. And by the way,” she added calmly,

“if you feel anything trying to pull you in or immobilize your arm, yell

and fight and kick and scream, and we’ll help you to get out.”

There was a long, long minute of silence.

“So basically, you think there are things all around on the ground

in the thicket, and that we might get hold of them just by reaching in

blindly,” Matt said.

“Yes,” Mrs. Flowers said.

“All right,” said Tyrone, and once again Matt glanced at him